Coping with change: The small experiment as a strategic approach to environmental sustainability

The patterns of living, planning, and resource utilization as practiced in Western countries for decades are not sustainable; change of some sort is e ssential. But what changes are appropriate, and, perhaps more important, wi ll people accept them? The small experiment framework provides a strategy f or meeting the challenge of change. By encouraging participation, limiting the scale of initial change, and incorporating some aspects of the familiar , many of the difficulties that make change so problematic can be mitigated or even eliminated. An exploration, from a psychological perspective, of t he characteristic difficulties surrounding potential change provides the co ntext for a discussion of the components of the small experiment and an ana lysis of how these elements address these characteristic challenges. A comp arison to adaptive management is drawn, and several concrete examples illus trate how the strategy has been used successfully to address a variety of e nvironmental problems.