Fostering consumers’ climate (change) engagement

Despite rapidly advancing scholarship on consumer engagement and climate change as individual domains, understanding of their theoretical interface remains underdeveloped, revealing a key gap in the literature. Addressing this gap, this article and Special Issue advance insight into the interdisciplinary topic area of fostering consumers’ climate (change) engagement by taking a self-determination theory perspective. Specifically, drawing on the theory, we suggest that consumers are likely to internalize or adopt initially extrinsic financial, social, and recognition rewards through their latent cogno-emotional, socio-emotional, and socio-cognitive engagement, respectively. These are, in turn, proposed to drive the development of autonomous, relatedness-based, and competence-oriented climate (change) engagement behaviors, respectively, as summarized in the proposed conceptual model and an associated set of propositions. We next introduce the articles featured in this Special Issue, which are linked to the proposed model, followed by the development of a future research agenda that emerges from this pioneering interdisciplinary Issue.