Sustainability behaviour change
Initiative description: Expanding B4Development’s policy experiments using insights from behavioural economics and psychology to gently ‘nudge’ FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ stakeholders towards more sustainable choices contributing to the achievement of the objectives and initiatives in the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ Sustainability Strategy.
The B4Development Foundation (B4D) is the Arab world’s first behavioural insights and nudge unit, founded in 2016 by the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC). Leveraging insights from behavioural sciences, B4D promotes evidence-based policies to address challenges with behavioural roots. Through rigorous experimentation, the foundation partners with policymakers, organisations, and individuals to design interventions toward greater social impact, inclusive growth, and good governance.
B4D has worked on more than 70 experiments to improve outcomes in areas such as workers’ living and working conditions, environmental sustainability, youth education and empowerment, inclusivity, and health, safety and security for attendees, participants and communities.
Environmental sustainability and healthy lifestyle experiments make up the largest portion of the total. Environmental sustainability experiments tend to focus on plastic cutlery and food waste. Healthy lifestyle experiments focus mainly on vaccine uptake, healthy eating and physical activity.
In the lead up to the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™, B4D carried out research into the best approaches to improve sustainable behaviours in order to support the goals of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ sustainability strategy. The most relevant examples of this work are included below.
Promoting environmentally friendly behaviours
B4D designed and implemented two experiments to encourage recycling and reduce littering during the FIFA Club World Cup Qatar 2020™. These were conducted as randomised trials, meaning that the behaviour in a treatment group where nudges were introduced were always compared to a control group with no nudge intervention. The experiments took place at Education City Stadium, with seating blocks randomly allocated to either control or treatment. A behavioural survey to test the knowledge and attitudes of fans towards environmental sustainability was also conducted.
Recycling experiment
The first experiment focussed on recycling. Results showed that encouraging people to recycle had a significant impact on increasing correct waste segregation. The nudge intervention consisted of highlighting the moral value of recycling through signs placed above recycling and general waste bins, such as “Do good! Recycle right.” For the control pair of bins, the sign simply read “Recycle”. Overall, the correct disposal of waste in both the recycling and general waste bins in the treatment group increased by 12.5% compared to the control group.
Waste disposal experiment
In the second experiment, reminders were placed on the floor of the seating areas in an attempt to reduce the amount of waste fans left behind after the match. The intervention consisted of large floor banner stickers with a short and concise message reading: “WAIT! Please do not leave your waste behind!”, both in English and Arabic. These were placed on one of the lateral sides of the pitch, while control sections had no stickers. The number of waste items under each seat per row in both control and treatment groups were counted. The analysis suggested that exposing fans to a timely reminder that urges them not to leave any waste behind reduced their littering behaviour. On average, every row contained around 1.7 seats with litter in zones without interventions, compared to 1.4 seats with litter in zones that had a nudge intervention.
Sustainability-awareness survey
In addition to the experiments mentioned above, a short survey was administered at Education City Stadium. Posters were displayed across the stadium which invited fans, via a QR code, to take part in a survey to win a prize. The survey revealed that only 11% of respondents knew how to correctly dispose of waste, despite over 70% of respondents recognising the impact of correctly disposing and recycling waste. Additionally, about 30% of fans were identified as ‘aspirational recyclers’*: people who wrongly recycled items that are not recyclable. ‘Aspirational recyclers’ were more likely (8 percentage points) to believe in the impact of individual actions in the delivery of sustainable football tournaments, particularly the impact of individual recycling efforts.
Outcomes of these experiments informed the waste disposal and recycling strategy developed for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™.
* Aspirational recycling, or ‘wish-cycling’ consists of people recycling items that are not recyclable, hoping they are contributing to environmental sustainability.
Increasing the use of workers’ grievance mechanisms
The Workers’ Welfare Forums, championed by the SC, were secure and interactive meetings where workers on FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ related projects could voice their concerns and grievances without fear of reprisal. Grievances raised by workers were grouped as follows: accommodation facilities and services, food & beverage, work conditions, salary, health and social activities. Despite rigorous efforts to popularise this initiative, the quality and quantity of reported grievances in these forums was initially quite low.
Following an analysis of the challenge, several possible causes emerged behind the low number of reported grievances by workers’ representatives, including fear of retaliation and a lack of sufficient knowledge about the types of grievances that could be raised. To better understand and address this issue, two experiments were designed to:
Make it easier for workers to raise grievances, by displaying posters that described different types of grievances in prominent positions;
Help representatives capture and report more of the workers’ grievances in the monthly forum, by providing notebooks.
Results were positive for both experimental interventions, showing an increase in the number of complaints raised by the workers to their elected representative. This demonstrated that by using simple, eye-catching posters that outlined the six types of grievances that could be raised at the forum, ensuring they were written in some of the workers’ languages, and placing them in their accommodation sites, workers were more likely to raise complaints. Simplified posters in ten of the workers’ most commonly spoken languages led to a 42% increase in the number of grievances reported per worker in treatment groups compared to control groups.
Similarly, handing behaviourally informed paper notebooks to workers’ representatives in the treatment group which contained a simplified list of grievances that could be raised by workers on every page, along with a place to capture these, led to a 31% increase in the number of complaints representatives reported to the forum, compared to the control group. This intervention also created an atmosphere of engagement and more positive dynamics at subsequent Workers’ Welfare Forum meetings.
Nudging fans to eat healthily
On 18 October 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the State of Qatar in collaboration with FIFA launched the three-year joint project titled “Healthy FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ - Creating Legacy for Sport and Health”. One of the objectives of the project was to ensure that people attending the tournament had access to healthy food and enjoyed healthy food environments in and around the stadiums.
During the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™, a joint experiment was carried out by B4D, the WHO, Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health, and tournament organisers. Close to 30% of the food offer inside the stadiums, and around 21% at the FIFA Fan Festival™, were considered healthy as per WHO criteria.
In order to make the healthier food options an easier choice for fans, nudges were introduced to a treatment group and compared with a control group with no nudge intervention. These nudges included (a) positioning healthier food options at the top of the board menu and (b) removing condiments and sauces from the counters. The findings from the experiment showed that introducing these nudges increased the likelihood of ordering healthy items to variable levels.