Theories on motivation and their implication for supporting communication, learning and decisionmaking in relation to organic food systems

Summary

Efforts to promote communication, learning, decision making and change of individual and/or collective practices in relation to sustainability issues require more or less explicit theories on agents and what motivate them to act. The aim of this paper is to open for an interdisciplinary discussion on how different approaches to motivation make sense or not when focusing on how to develop tools aiming at supporting communica¬tion, learning and decision-making related to organic food systems. We present four quite different approaches to motivation – an economic, an approach challenging conventional understandings of motivational change, a psychosocial, and a relational – and open for a discussion on how these approaches relate to each other and whether it is possible to apply and distinguish between different ways of using the concept of motivation when we cross disciplinary borders in order to cooperate on developing tools for multi-criteria assessment and communication.