ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how communicators can prepare their respective communities to embrace a cooperative approach to resource management by adopting circular economy principles. It presents an overview of the various perspectives that researchers and practitioners have applied to better understand the factors that influence an individual’s commitment to pro-environmental behaviour when confronted with resource dilemmas. The chapter highlights the influence that certain factors – socio-demographic variables, an individual’s ecological concern, personal norms and habitual pro-environmental behaviour – have on an individual’s preference to cooperate with interdependent others to preserve and maintain natural resources. In an effort to preserve common resources, consumers in circular economies will confront a myriad of pro-environmental behaviour choices. Social dilemmas are characterized by two distinctive attributes: the payoff for the individual defecting behaviour is higher than the payoff for cooperating behaviour regardless of what others in society do, and collectively, all in a society will receive a lower payoff if all defect rather than cooperate.
