This document discusses how political psychology could pay more attention to social and psychological processes involved in responses to innovative laws, particularly those related to sustainability and environmental protection. It argues that different types of legal innovation exist and mobilize different acceptance and resistance processes. The document outlines conceptual tools for examining how people and groups receive legal innovation, drawing on social representation theory and environmental psychology. It proposes a typology of legal innovation based on three criteria: whether the law directly binds individuals or governments, its target (behaviors or intergroup relations), and whether it regulates private or public spheres. Examples are provided from sustainability laws to illustrate differences in acceptance and resistance processes for different types of legal innovation.

1. Political Psychology, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00863.x
Legal Innovation for Social Change: Exploring Change and
Resistance to Different Types of Sustainability Laws pops_863 105..121
Paula Castro
ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute and CIS-IUL
In this article I argue that a desirable future direction for political psychology would be to pay more attention
to social-psychological processes involved in the response to innovative laws, in particular those devised with
sustainability and environmental protection aims. This involves taking into account the following premises: (1)
innovation and change are not unitary phenomena; instead there are different types of innovation; (2) legal and
policy innovation is a specific type and is highly central in an era when global challenges are increasingly dealt
with by global treaties which are then translated into national laws with a call to transform local practices; (3)
offering attention to the reception of such innovation involves developing specific conceptual tools; (4) devising
a typology of legal innovation is one step in this direction; (5) furthering our comprehension of how people,
groups, and institutions receive—i.e., accept, contest—legal innovation for sustainability is important for
helping to push forward sustainability goals, which are legislated but far from attained.
The present article outlines theoretical tools for addressing psychosocial processes involved in the reception
of legal innovation, drawing mostly on the approach of social representations and the literature of environ-
mental psychology, and offers three criteria for a typology of laws. Finally I present some examples of responses
to subtypes of legal innovation from the sustainability domain, taken as an illustrative case, and discuss
differences and commonalities in the processes of acceptance and resistance that each mobilizes.
KEY WORDS: legal innovation, sustainability, resistance
Social and Cultural Change as a Field of Sociopsychological Inquiry
Societal change presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, change, often experienced as
uncontrollable, is a constant in our societies. On the other hand, and in contrast, change also
persistently fails to happen in our societies, as certain transformations recognized as highly desirable
remain unaccomplished.
This paradox signals, of course, that societal change is not a unitary phenomenon. Even if we
differentiate between change ignited by natural causes and change driven by human-made innova-
tion, the later is not unitary either. Therefore a vital step for understanding change is the creation of
typologies distinguishing: different types of innovation and change (1), that are proposed to society
by different social systems (2), and that mobilize different psychosocial phenomena (3).
Human-made innovation, occurring when previously nonexistent ideas or artefacts are introduced
in society, is the focus of the present article. However, as mentioned, human-made innovation is far
from being a unitary phenomenon. In our societies it can emerge from three main spheres: the
techno-scientific, policy-legal, and public spheres. Techno-scientific innovation—like the innovations
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2. 106 Castro
at the origin of GMOs or in-vitro fertilization—is extremely visible and sometimes provokes blatant
resistance like the one European publics offered to genetically modified foods (Bauer & Gaskell,
2002). However, the modifications it brings often seem to progress in spite of resistance. In contrast,
certain innovations originating in the policy-legal sphere can remain unattained for long periods, while
collecting consensus. Examples include efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions or to generalize the
use of condoms to prevent AIDS. Despite the investment of high amounts of work and money for trying
to generalize this type of innovation, some of its goals take a long time to be reached. Even as they
receive clear public support, it needs to be assumed that they also meet with resistance, and of a
type—subtle resistance—which requires a better understanding. Finally, innovation can also emerge
from the public sphere (Jovchelovitch, 2007). Here, innovation may promote societal change through
a number of processes, such as the influence of minority movements (Castro & Mouro, 2011;
Moscovici, 1961/1976; Orfali, 2006), the contact between different cultures (Jovchelovitch & Gervais,
1999; Wagner, Duveen, Verma, & Themel, 1999), or the transformations performed upon concepts of
scientific, legal, or policy origin (Moscovici, 1961/76; Spini & Doise, 1998). Innovation in this sphere
intertwines then with innovation produced in the other two.
In view of this, the present article concentrates on one type of human-made innovation only:
innovation originating in the legal and policy sphere. This type is highly central in an era of global
challenges, increasingly dealt with by global or supranational commitments (Beck, 2009) subse-
quently translated into national laws, which are called on to transform local practices. Conse-
quently, the psychosocial processes involved in the reception of these laws and in the translations
happening between levels (global, national, local) need to receive more attention from both politi-
cal and social psychology. They are part of a broader question with deep implications for political
psychology: the question of how to better understand the psychological citizen. In other words, how
to better understand the psychosocial processes through which people adjust to a certain sociopo-
litical order (Moghaddam, 2008), assuming that “adjust” may in some cases mean “resist.” This
requires looking at how people incorporate aspects of the normative system, viewing this system as
including not just values, ideologies, or informal norms (Moghaddam, 2008), but also actual laws
and policy commitments.
Aiming to sharpen conceptual tools for addressing the issues above, the present article will: (1)
appraise some difficulties and lacunae in the social-psychological knowledge of the reception of
legal innovation; (2) establish some generic conceptual premises to further our understanding of how
legal and policy innovation may be accepted and internalized, generate generalized societal change,
or be resisted; (3) identify subtypes of legal innovation, and look at the specific psychosocial
processes each mobilizes, offering examples from the sustainability and environmental protection
field used here as an illustrative case study.
Change and Social Psychology: Some Difficulties
Although the topic of innovation and societal change has always interested social psychology,
there are several reasons why the discipline has not offered more attention to it. The first reason is
that too often analysts forget that change is not a unitary phenomenon (see Armitage & Conner,
2001), and different types of change involve different psychosocial aspects (Stern, 2000). In parallel,
the various types of innovation have not received the same amount of attention. Even the theory of
social representations, which has the goal of examining how innovation transforms social knowl-
edge, has more extensively studied how scientific innovation transforms common sense (Bauer &
Gaskell, 2002, 2008; Moscovici, 1961/76; Wagner, Kronberger, & Seifert, 2002) and has offered
scanter attention to legal innovation (but see Spini & Doise, 2005).
The peripheral place accorded to legal innovation may be due to various reasons as well. One has
to do with the fact that the concept of “norm” does not differentiate in a clear fashion between

3. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 107
informal norms and formal or legal ones (those included in legislative frameworks; e.g., Cialdini &
Trost, 1998). Most research on norms assumes that people are part of more or less voluntarily formed
social groups, in which norms are codefined without constraints, and thereby ignore the institutional
dimensions (and inequalities) of social life (Uzzell & Rathzel, 2009, p. 7), laws included. The neglect
of the distinction between formal and informal norms has detrimental consequences. It makes it
impossible to examine whether formal and informal rules mobilize differing psychosocial responses
or are internalized and negotiated in different ways, and therefore leaves important aspects of the
psychological citizen uninterrogated. This neglect may, in turn, be linked to the fact that most of the
research guided by the concept of norms elides the role of time. The inclusion of time could,
nevertheless, make even more operative the important distinction between prescriptive norms (indi-
cating how things should be) and descriptive norms (how things are) (Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno,
1991). Studies using the distinction often disregard that, in order to fulfil their role, legal norms must
necessarily in time convert from prescriptive to descriptive. This has diverted attention from pro-
cesses promoting or slowing down this conversion and has also prevented a comparison of the pace
of this conversion across different types of laws, whose targets and/or binding forces may vary.
Another reason for the neglect of change promoted by legal innovation is the pervasiveness in
social psychology of a conceptualization of power as involving dependence and repression (Simon
& Oakes, 2006). Recent research has highlighted the need to take into account the way power can
also be a source of social change (Simon & Oakes, 2006). Yet even these accounts focus more on the
power of informal groups and tend to forget the power of governments and societal institutions for
promoting change through legislative and policy means. They therefore again overlook the institu-
tional aspects of change and its societal dimension. However, at this point, when global governance
is a reality in many areas, understanding change means that the societal dimension needs to be
considered, and at several levels: the role of national institutions for imposing innovative forms of
behavior needs to be taken into account (Farr, 1998; Foucault, 1980), but so does the role of
supranational and global institutions (Castro & Batel, 2008; Castro & Mouro, 2011).
One area where global and national governance are today attempting to stimulate major soci-
etal transformations is undoubtedly that of sustainability. In many countries around the world and
clearly in European Union (EU) Member States, environmental protection and sustainability are
currently goals supported by numerous regulations and laws (Baker, 2007), some of which origi-
nate in global treaties and commitments. Surveys show how these goals attain a generic and high
public consensus. However, practices have not changed to the same extent (Vining & Ebreo,
2002). These facts have in the last years renewed the interest of social scientists in the questions
of how: (1) to accelerate changes in both public and private-sphere behavior (Stern, 2000); (2) to
better conceptualize the ideas-practices relationship; (3) to make more effective the institutional
mediating systems—agencies, institutes, and offices—in charge of implementing new laws (Castro
& Mouro, 2011).
This article contends that in order to respond to these challenges, and use the insights gained to
help environmental protection and sustainability move forward, some psychological disciplines must
more consistently focus on the legal and institutional side of societal change. The legal and institu-
tional aspects of change are integral to the political, and so this is clearly a task for political
psychology. But the focus on these aspects of change can also help social and environmental
psychology overcome the notion, still prevalent in many studies, that achieving social change means
mainly remodelling the behavior of single individuals (Uzzell & Rathzel, 2009). Focusing on the
legal and institutional side of change can stimulate research to pay more attention to the relations and
commitments of individuals in the social world, as citizens or professionals, as shall be illustrated.
It can inspire accrued interest in the institutional support innovative sustainability laws receive—or
lack—in the different contexts and institutions to which individuals are committed as citizens or
professionals (Castro & Batel, 2008). It can also motivate studies to look at the interplay of power

4. 108 Castro
relations between the various institutions and groups involved in the production and transformation
of green discourses (Harré, Brockmeier, & Muhlhausler, 1999). Extending our understanding of
these aspects can then be an important contribution for both psychology and sustainability.
Specific Objectives in Examining Societal Change
The difficulties appraised above suggest that extending our comprehension of the psychosocial
processes through which legal innovation is accommodated in the preexisting fabric of social
knowledge and relations requires an approach capable of inviting us to look at relations rather than
isolated individuals (Elcheroth, Doise, & Reicher, 2011), like that of social representations. Impor-
tantly for addressing our topic here, this approach assumes that social change is not an on/off
accomplishment, but a complex process resulting in the coexistence of competing meaning (Castro
& Batel, 2008; Castro & Lima, 2001; Spini & Doise, 1998; Wagner et al., 1999). The social
representations approach also sees change as unfolding in phases and demanding a temporal per-
spective. Moreover, some of these phases endow certain representations and discourses with insti-
tutional force (Batel & Castro, 2009; Elcheroth et al., 2011), and this affects resistance to innovation
and change in specific ways.
In the next sections these proposals will be substantiated, further drawing on the approach of
social representations and the literature of environmental psychology. A typology of legal innovation
will afterwards be offered, with the following criteria for differentiating subtypes of laws: (1)
whether the binding force of the innovations is exerted directly upon individuals or groups or upon
governments; (2) what is the target of the laws: whether they apply to individual behaviors, like those
banning smoking in certain places, or regulate intergroup relations, like the laws of public involve-
ment; and (3) and whether the laws apply to behaviors of the private or of the public sphere. A last
section will illustrate the typology with examples from the environmental and sustainability research
in order to also contribute towards a more encompassing understanding of this field.
Conceptualizing Change Linked to Legal Innovation
Change as a Temporal Process: The Stages of Legal Innovation
As mentioned, a temporal perspective is fundamental for understanding societal change. A
model of four stages can help in organizing the development of legal and policy innovation (see
Castro, Garrido, Reis, & Menezes, 2009a).
During Stage 1—the Emergence stage—an innovative idea or concern emerges in society, often
proposed by a minority. During this phase the process of social change is mainly bottom-up: the new
idea starts spreading, and a new set of values and a new discourse start to organize around it. If the
new values or discourses come to achieve a certain level of social consensus and legitimacy, it may
happen that new measures follow at the societal level. The new societal measures are taken in Stage
2—the Institutionalization stage. In this stage the new consensus is translated into a set of legal,
policy, and institutional innovations (see Castro, 2006 and Baker, 2007 for examples of this process
for environmental protection). This translation is of course not a simple or undisputed process, but
a contested one, with different groups attempting to shape these laws in different ways (see Rosa &
Silva, 2005, for an analysis of the different values and goals expressed in the documents produced
by the different stakeholders for the EU debates preparing the Natura 2000 biodiversity protection
laws).
Once the new laws are in place, and the new mediating systems in charge of implementing them,
like Ministries or Governmental offices and agencies, are created, the Generalization stage begins.

5. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 109
In this third phase, the legal innovations are proposed to society through media campaigns, plans, and
other incitements aimed at transforming ideas and coordinating them with practices. At this point the
main direction of change is top-down.1 At this crucial stage resistance factors may intervene to slow
down the process of laws, converting from prescriptive to descriptive. Only if the Generalization
phase is brought to full realization do we enter the fourth and last stage: Stabilization, when action
and discourse become fully coordinated.
The benefit of hindsight helps appreciate these usually slow transformations. The transforma-
tions that occurred in the early twentieth century in the area of hygiene and sanitization are a good
example. If today hygiene practices are not the object of debate and controversy, but routine, this is
the result of a major and prolonged societal effort (Beck-Gernshein, 2000). In our days ecological
and sustainability concerns seem to be undergoing a similar process, and the parallel does not go
unnoticed, as the extract below testifies:
Activist of environmental NGO: ideally these (ecological behaviors) should be daily habits,
like, like . . . like showering every morning . . . things that are taken for granted . . . and go
unquestioned . . . and you don’t think about . . . habits that are natural . . . (Group inter-
view, July 1999, see Castro, 2006).
This extract illustrates well the idealized trajectory of what can be termed normative change, a
process in which formal laws devised at the macro level become in time norms accepted from the
“inside,” at the micro level, integrated as cultural imperatives, or “things that are taken for granted”
(Castro & Mouro, 2011; Foucault, 1980, 1982). This process of internalization hinges on the fact that,
in current democratic societies, citizens have a “delegative status” which makes them “agents” of the
laws (Foucault, 1982; Rutherford, 1999) and determines that in time laws tend to function as norms
rather than as rigid prohibitions (Rutherford, 1999). In other words, in time “the normative system
moves from the macro to the micro level and becomes effective in personal relationships” (Moghad-
dam, 2008, p. 894) and everyday decisions. The importance of certain objects, such as the Islamic veil,
as “carriers” that signal the internalization of certain old and stabilized macro norms and show the
identity of the psychological citizen as aligned with them has been highlighted (Moghaddam, 2008).
However, more needs to be known about the psychosocial processes operating in phases when
new laws are being proposed and new routines still need to be established. From the point of view
of social representations, these are phases when laws as societal proposals are in the process of
changing from being only “transcendent” representations (existing independently of the practice to
which they are relevant; see Harré, 1998), and become interwoven in practices across various
contexts (Castro & Batel, 2008). Achieving this is the major task of the Generalization phase, and
during it certain social-psychological phenomena play a major role for accelerating or slowing down
change.
Acceptance and Resistance to Legal Innovation as Social-Psychological Phenomena
The previous section illustrated how social change is a complex process unfolding in phases and
how societal change cannot happen without the coordination of discourse and action, of what is said
and what is done (Brown, 2001; Castro & Batel, 2008; Giddens, 1979). However it is crucial to also
take into account that it is possible for innovation to initially impact only one of these levels—
discourse or action—and that sometimes the two levels can remain uncoordinated for long periods
1
These phases should not be taken as static and clear-cut ones, of course; the model presented is, like all models, a simplified
description of main trends; there are in all phases instances of top-down and bottom-up influences, showing how law
constantly influences society and vice versa.

6. 110 Castro
of time, with talk sometimes even replacing or postponing action (Harré, Brockmeier, & Muhlhau-
sler, 1999). This means that action and talk need to be conceptualized as two separate but interde-
pendent levels. Consequently, the fact that discourse can be seen as action, that is, as performing
certain functions regarding the constitution of social reality (Howarth, 2006; Potter, 1996), should
not make us forget that not all action is discursive (Brown, 2001) and that talk and action only acquire
their full meaning in relation to each other (Giddens, 1979).
These facts—discourse and action are two separate but interdependent levels—have major
consequences for the study of change led by legal innovation. They open to individuals, groups, and
institutions various possible routes for resistance to legal innovation during the Generalization phase,
which will next be presented. This in turn raises new research questions about the extent to which types
of resistance vary with types of laws, something to be discussed in the final sections of the article.
A first possibility for resistance arises from the alluded-to fact that action and discourse can be
kept disconnected: people can take advantage of this by expressing agreement with legal and policy
innovations while failing to act accordingly. The most recurrent finding of environmental research is
precisely this gap between ecological attitudes (consistently high) and ecologically relevant behavior
(always lower; Vining & Ebreo, 2002). This means that many individuals declaring agreement—or
positive attitudes—towards behaviors like recycling or water saving also declare that they do not in
fact recycle (Castro et al., 2009a; Vining & Ebreo, 2002) or do not save water (Kurz, Donaghue,
Rapley, & Walker, 2005). This gap is most consistently found for private-sphere behaviors but is less
well established for public-sphere ones (Mouro & Castro, 2010), a fact which emphasizes the
relevance of identifying different types of laws and examining if they are indeed linked to different
types of resistance.
Other possible routes for resistance to new laws arise from the very nature of discourse and
communication. Because discourse and communication are not forms of “conveying information”
but instead transformative activities (Marková, 2008), they produce “translated objects” (Bauer &
Gaskell, 2008), and not simple “copies.” In other words, there is a potential for resistance embedded
in the vulnerability of language to resignification (Bauer & Gaskell, 2008; Raby, 2005). This applies
to many innovations, of course, not just new laws. All types of new norms or values can be
reinterpreted and resignified, and it is through their reinterpretative re-presentation that social
representations and discourses come to evolve and change (Castro & Batel, 2008; Howarth, 2006;
Marková, 2008; Moscovici, 1981; Potter, 1996). However, this fact is especially important for new
laws. Because many laws, or some of their components, are formulated in rather generic and vague
terms—identifying desirable goals and values to be respected, but not forcibly defining in detail the
actions to be performed—they are particularly vulnerable to resignification. However, being laws,
meta-knowledge about them signals that the resignification work has to keep within certain socially
approved boundaries (Castro & Batel, 2008; Howarth, 2006). These are defined, among other factors,
by the interplay of the various groups and institutions involved and by how “natural” or “correct”
certain linked social arrangements are viewed in a culture (Moghaddam, 2008). If a certain new law
has no cultural resonance and no consensus it can be rather difficult to implement it: an example is
the U.S. prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, a famous failure. These aspects together have several
consequences.
One consequence is that hybrid representations can be created and made to accommodate both
agreement and disagreement with the legal and policy innovations. This can be done through the
creative elaboration of arguments which present, under a conciliatory light, ideas or practices that
formerly seemed contradictory (Castro & Lima, 2001; Kurz et al., 2005). The notion of “sustainable
development” offers an example of this creativity: during the initial years of the Emergence stage of
ecological change, “green” critics raised many objections to “development” as unfair to some groups
and entailing too much consumption of resources; however, when later on “development” became
qualified as “sustainable,” the resulting expression became acceptable and influent (Uzzell &

7. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 111
Rathzel, 2009). Today the fuzzy and conciliatory notion of “sustainable development” is omnipres-
ent. It is so broad that even groups with diverging goals can find their interests represented in it,
which is positive from the point of view of social cohesion (Uzzell & Rathzel, 2009). However, this
same broadness may act as a barrier to radically altering previous practices and shows how the
human capacity for symbolically overcoming contradiction through conciliatory notions and dis-
courses can be a form of resisting innovation as much as a way of adapting to it.
Another way of expressing both agreement and disagreement with the same issue is by resorting
to different views and positions in different contexts (Jovchelovitch & Gervais, 1999; Wagner et al.,
1999). Still another is by using the general/concrete distinction and agreeing with the issue in general
and disagreeing for concrete cases (Castro & Batel, 2008; Spini & Doise, 1998), as shall be seen in
more detail further on. Expressions of both agreement and disagreement can also be linked to
ambivalence. One consequence of living in societies with heterogeneity of views, such as ours, is
exposure to competing core values (Keele & Wolak, 2008) thematized by alternative arguments and
discourses (Marková, 2008). In the Generalization phase, it has become clear to citizens that the new
laws reflect new core values; however, these new values do not fully replace the old ones: instead, old
and new values live together in the culture (Castro & Lima, 2001), which exposes citizens to
opposing messages (Keele & Wolak, 2008) and may result in ambivalence (Castro et al., 2009a). And
since lower ambivalence is associated with higher belief strength (Keele & Wolak, 2008), ambiva-
lence can be seen as a factor promoting resistance. Here the relevance of defining subtypes of legal
innovation becomes again evident, for, from the various the types of resistance identified above,
some may be contingent upon the type of legal innovation involved.
Mediating Systems and Change
A further consequence of many laws being formulated in generic terms becomes manifest when
laws are translated to concrete, contextual practices. During the Generalization phase, institutions that
work as mediating systems, such as offices, regulatory agencies, institutes, or NGOs, and also the mass
media, are called to do this translation and become pivotal actors in change led by legal innovation. In
fact, many legal innovations require the constitution of new mediating systems to give them concrete
content and implement them. For instance, in EU Member States many Green Dot societies were
created to implement European Parliament and Council Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and
(recycling of) packaging waste. As these institutions are responsible for offering concrete content to
the abstract formulations of the laws (Castro & Batel, 2008), the contextual resignification processes
they operate result in different versions of the laws arising in practice. Some specific law-practice
translations can minimize the potential impact for change implicit in the new laws, while other
translations can maximize it (Castro & Batel, 2008). The other side of this is, naturally, that the
communities and individuals to whom mediating systems pass on their versions of the new laws also
try to contest and reshape these. This suggests that a political psychology concerned with the
psychosocial aspects of the reception of new laws needs to focus on the detailed examination of
communication between mediating systems and their publics. This can reveal the power positions
of the groups involved in contesting or applauding the laws, how these may be linked to issues of
perceived legitimacy of knowledge (Batel & Castro, 2009; Howarth, 2006), and how discourses are
employed for advancing change or resisting it (Castro & Batel, 2008; Morant, 2006).
Varieties of Legal Innovation: A Typology
The next sections present the criteria for a typology of legal regulations, offer examples of new
laws regulating sustainability-relevant practices, and discuss some of the psychosocial processes

8. 112 Castro
mobilized by different subtypes of these new laws. A typology is a powerful descriptive tool, capable
of producing a synthetic overview of a topic and the research about it. It helps locate the subtypes for
which there is a full body of studies and identify the less studied ones, thereby helping detect topics
for future research.
A typology of laws can be defined according to three criteria:
(1) The binding target of the laws: whether the laws only bind governments or if they directly
bind individuals/groups; some of the new environmental laws only directly bind governments. For
instance, following EU Directives transposed to their legal frameworks, many EU Member States
have issued legislation committing them to attain certain percentages of recycled waste by a certain
specified year. Waste Framework Directive (Directive 2008/98/EC) is the latest example; it lays
down targets for EU Member States for the recycling of waste for the year 2020: 50% for household
waste recycling. These laws do not stipulate sanctions to individuals that fail to act in the specified
way (e.g., that fail to separate domestic waste), and so they do not directly bind individuals; they
however bind the governments.
(2) The context of the laws: behaviors of the public sphere or of the private sphere. The
sustainability literature has shown the importance of considering different predictors for behaviors of
each sphere (Stern, 2000).
(3) The level at which the laws operate: criteria considering whether the laws target individual
behavior or regulate intergroup relations (Castro & Batel, 2008). Laws targeting individual behavior
are, in many cases, although not all, rather unambiguous: for instance, “it is forbidden to smoke in
offices” is a law directly applying to individual behavior and leaving little space for interpretation.
Laws regulating intergroup relations—like those asking for public consultation of communities for
large projects—are often characterized by larger margins of ambiguity in the definition of the actual
practices to be followed.
The combination of the three criteria produces eight theoretically possible subtypes of laws. The
new sustainability laws, namely those instigated by EU Directives of recent years, include laws
exemplifying almost all subtypes. For instance, the biodiversity protection laws that forbid the
construction of new houses in protected areas are laws “of the public sphere,” “directly binding for
individuals” and targeting “individual behavior.” The laws stipulating levels of recycling of domestic
waste are laws “of the private sphere,” “directly binding for governments only” and targeting
“individual behavior.” The laws about public consultation are laws “of the public sphere,” “directly
binding for individuals” and targeting “intergroup relations.”
The pages to follow will resort to examples taken mostly from environmental research in order
to illustrate the psychosocial processes associated to different subtypes and how these contribute to
slowing down or accelerating the pace of the changes the laws propose. The examples will make
clear what the topics are and the psychosocial processes researched per subtype. This will also show
which subtypes received more attention from research and which received less. These matters will
then be discussed in the concluding remarks.
Case 1: The Private Sphere
Subcase 1.1. Laws Are Directly Binding Only for Governments—But These Need the
Collaboration of Individuals
As mentioned, there are various examples of legal innovations for sustainability directly binding
only governments, and not individuals, although governments cannot attain their goals without the
cooperation of individuals. The new laws and regulations governing the practices connected to the
recycling of domestic waste and to energy and water conservation are examples of this subtype of
laws. Since these laws bind governments, these finance media campaigns and devise institutional
arrangements, such as curbside collection, as measures intended to gradually change the behavior of

9. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 113
individuals in their private spaces. The measures, characteristic of the Stage of Generalization, signal
the new national core values and norms. Therefore individuals can be expected to avoid blatant
opposition to them. However, research abundantly shows people still circumvent the laws in
various ways, namely by keeping ideas and actions uncoordinated (Vining & Ebreo, 2002). As
mentioned, it is also reasonable to think that this process is accompanied by ambivalence, since by
stimulating the social debate, legal innovation originates new arguments and counterarguments
(Marková, 2008; Moscovici, 1981), and consequently heterogeneous ideas regarding the same
social object become available for individual decision making, promoting ambivalence. Sustain-
ability studies are starting to focus on ambivalence (Castro et al., 2009a; Ojala, 2008), and results
show that those individuals who report high ambivalence also report lower levels of recycling
behavior, as compared to those who report low ambivalence (Castro et al., 2009a). In sum, then,
ambivalence seems to slow down the acceptance of these new laws and may be one major resis-
tance factor to this specific type of laws.
Environmental research has abundantly focused on the proecological behaviors of the private
sphere regulated by laws targeting individuals only indirectly, through the commitments of their
governments (see Bamberg & Möser, 2007). The major research result is the already mentioned gap
often found between attitudes/beliefs and behaviors. Not many of these studies, however, directly
inquire about laws. One study about water conservation does and has shown an interesting contra-
diction: while in general respondents disagree with the prospect of having the government imposing
laws for water conservation, they clearly indicate that if they existed these laws would be useful and
effective (see Corral-Verdugo & Frías-Armenta, 2006, Table 1, p. 414). However, their beliefs on the
efficacy of the laws do not predict their water-conservation behaviors. In other words, in order to be
effective, the laws must exist as such, and not as informal norms. This is interesting indirect evidence
supporting the notion that informal and formal norms work through different psychosocial processes
and future research needs to differentiate them.
Important in this regard is also that it has been shown that the more public these private
behaviors become, the more consistent the attitude-behavior relation becomes. For instance, public
commitment to certain ecological behaviors of the private sphere can increase their performance
(Joule, Girandola, & Bernard, 2007). A group discussion can more effectively change the use of toxic
cleaning products compared to individually targeted messages (Werner, Sansone, & Brown, 2008).
This accentuates the same aspect highlighted above: making these behaviors public may be a form
of intensifying the social pressure over them, particularly during the Generalization phase, when
social control over attitude-behavior consistency can be anticipated.
Subcase 1.2. Laws Are Directly Binding for Individuals and Regulate Behaviors of the
Private Sphere
Despite the relevance offered by the sustainability discourse to changes in individual behavior
for resource conservation (Uzzell & Rathzel, 2009), conservation laws directly targeting individuals
by prohibiting or enforcing new behaviors in the private sphere are not abundant. Instead, the rule in
all EU Member States is, as mentioned, that governments and mediating systems organize educa-
tional and structural measures. However, there are exceptions. In Switzerland, there are different
bags for different types of waste, and if nonrecyclable waste is put in the wrong bag, agents—health
and police officials—can look inside for clues of the offender’s identity. If the person is found, s/he
is imputed a fine. And some cities, such as New York City, have created laws that enforce fines upon
citizens who throw away certain recyclable materials.2
2
The laws offer first-time offenders in one to eight-unit residences the option to attend recycling workshops in lieu of paying
fines (New York City Council; http://council.nyc.gov/html/releases/recycling_4_10_10.shtml).

10. 114 Castro
Examples from the past, like the hygienist transformations of the nineteenth century, can also
provide more insights into this case. Whereas until the nineteenth century health was God’s affair, the
hygienist theses transformed health into a scientific and legislative matter (Beck-Gernshein, 2000).
Institutional actors, like health professionals and governments (Porter, 1993), devised laws that
made, for instance, vaccination mandatory and created a sanitary police force able to enter the private
sphere. In time, the interference of the police in the private space of fellow citizens became not just
accepted but requested as a right (see Castro, Lima, Sousa, & Sobral, 2009b). This shows that the
control mechanisms became stronger when what was formerly private (hygiene and health habits in
the home) became redefined as being also of public interest. For current environmental research, and
for a political psychology seeking to better understand the psychological citizen, this indicates a need
to devise studies able to provide comparisons between contexts (countries or regions) where there are
different types of laws—directly and indirectly binding citizens to certain private sphere behaviors.
Case 2: The Public Sphere
Subcase 2.1. Laws Are Directly Binding for Individuals/Groups, and Remodel Intergroup Relations
In order to illustrate some of the psychosocial processes operating when legal innovation targets
intergroup relations in the public sphere and is directly binding for individuals or specific groups, two
examples will be discussed: (1) the new legal framework regulating public involvement; (2) some
aspects of the new laws regulating protected areas for biodiversity conservation.
Regarding the first example, after the Rio 92 Summit several countries around the world signed
treaties committing them to depend on local participation as a key element for sustainability, like the
Agenda 213 or the Lisbon Treaty on Sustainable Towns (1996). During the last decade, several EU
Directives and Regulations, like Regulation (EC) 1367/2006, were also issued, emphasizing the need
of incorporating the suggestions of the public into decision making (Gonçalves, 2002). The innovative
laws these documents originated initiated a reconfiguration of lay-expert relationships, threatening
established power positions and altering the forms of legitimization of knowledge systems (Batel &
Castro, 2009). Therefore resistance to them was to be expected from those, like experts and decision
makers, who previously had more decision-making power (Simon & Oakes, 2006).
However, as these are laws, resistance to them needs to assume socially approved forms (Castro
& Batel, 2008). In this regard, resignifications attenuating their potential for change, but not opposing
them directly, are an example of a possible resistance path. This was illustrated by a study looking at
a community controversy in which residents invoked the new laws for contesting the nonexistence of
public consultation regarding a major rehabilitation decision affecting them (see Castro & Batel,
2008). The discourse of urban rehabilitation experts dealt with the contestation by resorting to the
general/concrete distinction (Castro & Batel, 2008). This distinction enabled them to defend public
participation as a good idea in general, but as not applicable to the concrete, particular controversy
under discussion. The professionals also argued that as citizens they considered the new participation
laws positive, but as experts and professionals they considered their own knowledge more legitimate
(Batel & Castro, 2009). Another, recurrent, form of expert resistance to public participation was the
strategy of offering a minimalist version of public participation. This involved the experts presenting
two aspects of the laws of participation—information and involvement—as equivalent, thereby
redefining information given to the public as involvement and as sufficient to assure participation. This
can be considered a minimization (Potter, 1996) strategy, and it was found not just for urban
3
Here are some of the goals of Agenda 21, as stated in Section 1: “The overall objective is to improve or restructure the
decision-making process so that consideration of socio-economic and environmental issues is fully integrated and a broader
range of public participation assured. (. . .) To develop or improve mechanisms to facilitate the involvement of concerned
individuals, groups and organizations in decision-making at all levels” (source: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
res_agenda21_08.shtml).

11. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 115
rehabilitation, but also for water management (Lima & Pato, 2006). The result of these
re-presentations of the laws is the closing down of their potential for change, maintaining the
expert-public relations only minimally reconfigured.
The second example regards new laws which reconfigure lay-expert relationships by, instead,
giving more power of decision to experts, not the public, like some of the laws associated with the
Natura 2000 Network of protected sites and others governing natural parks. The Natura 2000
network of protected sites is a set of areas currently covering about 20% of EU territory. Over the last
decade, biodiversity protection in EU member states has largely been concentrated in the sites of this
network, which include both private and state-owned land. The sites are governed by new laws
resulting from national adaptations of European Commission (EC) Directives4 and by the institutions
created to implement them nationally. The initial definition of areas and priorities relied almost
exclusively on biological and ecological expertise (Castro & Mouro, 2011). In the first years,
conservationists feared that encouraging participation would make it even more difficult to ensure
ecological protection (Chan et al., 2007; Stoll-Kleemann, 2001). Communities were not given a
relevant role and their knowledge of local issues was undervalued (Hiedanpää, 2005).
However, the Natura 2000 laws and other designations of protected areas were followed by
controversy among certain professional groups, such as farmers and hunters, calling for more
participation in the decision-making process (Buijs, 2009; Carrus, Bonaiuto, & Bonnes, 2005;
Hiedanpää, 2005; Hovardas & Stamous, 2006). The EC subsequently prepared new guidelines and
regulations for biodiversity conservation, with “sustainable development” as the central notion and a
clearer focus on conciliation between ecological and economic goals (Castro & Mouro, 2011). In the
sequence of Agenda 21, the Natura 2000 laws now also demand public consultation, and conservation
projects financed by the EC need to include forms of consulting the stakeholders. Yet, even when
participation processes are put into motion, actual change may take a long time to happen. Buijs (2009)
illustrates in a longitudinal study that joint meetings and the signature of an agreement on the
management of a Natura 2000 site after a period of strong conflict improved the relations between
experts and the community, but brought no significant changes to the government’s plans for the area.
All of this shows how the response to new laws is not a simple and linear process, but indeed a
contested, interactive one in which different groups try to have voice, while refraining from directly
attacking the new core values, when these, as is the case for sustainability, meet with social
consensus.
Subcase 2.2. Laws are Directly Binding for Individuals/Groups and Force Changes in Behaviors
of the Public Sphere
The Natura 2000 laws are varied and can be approached from two levels: that of inter-group
relations, as in the example above; and that of the individual reception of laws that seek to transform
individual behaviors for the sake of biodiversity protection. These include changes in agricultural
and land management practices, water uses, hunting traditions, and building processes. In this later
case we are dealing with laws targeting individual behaviors happening in the public sphere; we shall
now look at some psychosocial processes highlighted by the research for this subtype of laws.
Studies based on interviews and focus groups with residents in Natura 2000 sites in Portugal
(Castro & Mouro, 2011; Mouro & Castro, 2010) have shown that these residents never blatantly
contest the importance of biodiversity conservation laws. However, the exact meaning of specific
conservation rules and the stringency with which these should be implemented in concrete cases are
highly debated and contested issues. Here, too, arguments are based on the distinction between the
4
Council Directive 1979 (Birds Directive) and Council Directive 92/43/EEC (Habitats Directive) formed the initial legal
framework for Natura 2000 network of protected sites, and suffered some amendments along the years, like those of
Directive 2009/147/EC.

12. 116 Castro
general case (I agree with the laws) and concrete situations. Through this distinction, laws are
presented as lacking functionality, with examples grounded in concrete cases. One example (see
Castro & Mouro, 2011):
Local inhabitant (focus group): For instance, I really agree . . . that, for example, regarding
the bats . . . or the lynx, or whatever animal it may be . . . , very well, if they exist or existed,
I believe they must be preserved. Now, I cannot accept that two bats, a bat-couple, will for
two years prevent the construction of what could be an asset for me.
The example illustrates how the resignification of laws through the general/concrete distinction
can originate subtle resistance arguments. In this case, the argument used indicates that protection
may be a correct option, in general, when there are colonies of bats, but not for the concrete case
mentioned, where there are just one or two, or a few, bats. The final result, as with the public
participation laws discussed above, is an attempt to minimize the laws. But arguments such as these
also show how discourses about biodiversity anchor both in general categories (core values linked to
the “green discourse,” and to EU and national laws) as well as in local knowledge and concerns.
Some studies used surveys to look at what shapes support of the new law-governed protected areas
(Bonaiuto, Carrus, Martorella, & Bonnes, 2002; Carrus et al., 2005; Mouro & Castro, 2010). These
provide clear evidence of the importance of identification processes. However, a strong local identity
is in some cases positively associated with support for new the conservation laws (Carrus et al., 2005)
while in others it predicts resistance to them (Bonaiuto et al., 2002; Stoll-Kleeman, 2001). These
contradictory findings seem to be due to other psychosocial factors. One such factor is communities
having/not having been involved in the decision-making processes, with involvement resulting in more
acceptance (Carrus et al., 2005; also Carrus, Cini, Bonaiuto, & Mauro, 2009). Another factor is people
owning/not owning land in the region, an indicator of whether they are/are not directly bound by the
laws. For those owning land in Natura 2000 sites a stronger local identity predicts more positive
attitudes towards the protected site and support of the new practices (Mouro & Castro, 2010). These
findings suggest that when individuals or groups have to deal directly with the new regulations, pride
of living in a protected area is particularly relevant to enable positive evaluations of the legal
innovations. Another interesting contribution for discussing the role of identification for a positive
evaluation of new environmental laws comes from work showing that, contrary to expectations, place
identification does not significantly relate to the probability of performing illegal antiecological
behavior, like “camping in a beach” or “building a dwelling on land designated for agricultural use”
(Hernandez, Martín, Ruiz, & Hidalgo, 2010). As remarked by the authors (p. 287), this may be due to
the fact that the measure of identification used regarded the country, i.e., was not associated with a
specific territory. In other words, the relation between (refusing to do) illegal environmental actions
and place identification may only emerge when people link the laws to concrete places.
From another area, examples of laws regulating public sphere behaviors and directly binding
individuals are those prohibiting smoking in public places. In the EU the laws are rather recent, and
so we still lack studies. However, in face of what is said above, there are reasons for predicting the
success of the law: this is an unambiguously identifiable behavior, happening in the public space, and
the laws came after a well-advanced public debate about the negative effects of smoking. In fact, the
law seems to have met in most countries, and surely in Portugal, with irrefutable success, in a few
weeks changing the public behavior of smokers. Evidence from the United States, where the laws are
older, converges in showing that public support for the smoke-free law increased from 56% to 63%
after its implementation, and that respondents were more likely to perceive smoke exposure as a
health risk after the law took effect (Rayens et al., 2007). Again, here the evidence points in the
direction of the need to differentiate informal from formal norms, even in domains—like the
detrimental effects of smoke—that have been under public debate for many years.

13. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 117
Subcase 2.3. Laws Are Directly Binding Only for Governments and Force Changes in Intergroup
Relations in the Public Sphere
The European Commission has issued regulations for promoting the production of energy from
renewable sources—wind, solar, and hydroelectric—with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas
emissions and dependence on fossil fuel (Directive 2003/30/EC and Directive 2009/28/EC). The goal
is for EU Member States to attain energy that is 20% renewable by 2020. These are thus regulations
that bind governments and may alter the relationship between local communities and both govern-
mental experts and the companies proposing the new technologies. A study of the reception of
offshore wind farms in the U.K. coastal area has shown that resistance to these projects is again
associated to identification and representational processes (Devine-Wright & Howes, 2010). Some
communities represented the wind farms as disruptive because they were industrializing the area
(Devine-Wright & Howes, 2010). In this case, stronger levels of place attachment were associated
with resistance behaviors, such as signing a petition against the wind farms. In other communities,
where the landscape was run down, levels of contestation were lower, and place attachment was
unrelated to either support or protest.
Concluding Remarks
At the outset, this article suggested that a desirable future direction for political psychology was
to focus more on how legal innovation may encourage societal change, paying particular attention to
new laws and institutions currently governing sustainability and environmental protection. It also
contended that extending the analytic tools for addressing the effects of, and reactions to, this type
of innovation could help reach sustainability goals.
The article then dealt with two priority tasks for this: (1) systematizing some theoretical
tools for tackling the psychosocial aspects slowing down or promoting change lead by legal
innovation; (2) offering criteria for a typology of legal innovation. Next, the article, aiming at
providing good descriptions as a precondition for future explanations (Moghaddam, 2008; Mos-
covici, 1989), examined examples of environmentally relevant behaviors and practices governed
by different subtypes of new sustainability laws. The examples highlighted the following
conclusions.
When laws are directly binding for governments but not for individuals, and they target private
sphere behaviors, the main type of resistance is likely to be a gap between talk and action, as in
recycling, or water and energy conservation. Experienced ambivalence seems to play a relevant role
in this case, as the behavior is less frequently performed by those experiencing it. Making these
behaviors more public seems to diminish the gap. Formal rules seem also more effective than
informal ones. This implies that future research relevant for political psychology could compare the
coordination of discourses and practices (or lack of it) of individuals living in places with laws
targeting only governments, with those of individuals in contexts where laws can enforce individual
sanctions upon the same behaviors. Another important direction for future research would be to
compare the arguments people offer as justifications for the un-coordination of their actions and
discourses (when such is the case) in both these contexts. This would be a way of seeing whether and
how formal laws, as compared to informal rules, affect the limits of what is taken to be acceptable
or legitimate, why and for whom.
In turn, when laws are directly binding for individuals, and not just for governments, the pace
of change importantly depends on whether the laws target individual behavior or relations between
groups. When laws regulate individual behavior happening in the public sphere, unambiguously
defined, which has been the object of previous lengthy debates that built some consensus, and are
consistent with cultural imperatives, we can anticipate quicker change for behaviors, and an increase
in support for the laws, as happened with the nonsmoking laws.

14. 118 Castro
Regarding laws that regulate not individual actions per se, but instead intergroup relations and
thus may challenge power, various forms of resistance are to be expected. Resignifications operated
upon the new laws regulating intergroup relations rely on creative and socially approved distinctions
such as the general/concrete, the citizen/professional, and also on the minimization of the potential
for change implicit in the laws. When used by professionals of institutions in charge of translating
the laws, these distinctions may transform the original proposals of the law in the very process
of offering them concrete content. Consequently, a political psychology agenda interested in
legal innovation can include further attention to how and when mediating institutions minimize or
maximize the potential transformations the laws entail.
Also to be taken into account is the centrality of identification processes for the reception of new
laws regulating behaviors in the public sphere, both when these laws attempt to alter individual
behaviors and when they target intergroup relations. For a better understanding of these processes,
it is important to analyze the public debate in the periods preceding and following the issuing of the
laws (looking at the media, for instance). Examining the decision-making process when the laws
were prepared and identifying active contributors and absent groups (Castro, Mouro, & Gouveia,
2011) would also be a way for political psychology to develop knowledge about decision making
regarding the production of laws.
Still regarding directions for future research, two striking conclusions become immediately
obvious when we differentiate between types of laws through the typology here proposed. The first
is that psychological research so far has clearly concentrated on one subtype of laws: those regulating
behaviors of the private sphere governed by laws that usually target only governments directly. These
behaviors are even sometimes taken as the central examples of proenvironmental behavior. For
instance, a sizeable part of the studies included in a recent meta-analysis of the “psychosocial
determinants of pro-environmental behavior” (Bamberg & Möser, 2007) regard recycling; energy
conservation, green consumerism, and travel mode choice are the other behaviors included. Virtually
no studies about biodiversity conservation or public participation practices are included, i.e., no
studies about proenvironmental behaviors of the public sphere governed by laws targeting intergroup
relations are analyzed. This corroborates the notion that psychology too often relies on the premise
that achieving social change means remodelling the behavior of individuals (Uzzell & Rathzel,
2009). A political psychology focus concerned with legal innovation would help bring to the fore that
social change also means remodelling the relations among certain groups, and/or between these and
certain societal institutions, stimulating the engagement with environmental policy and decision
makers (Spence & Pidgeon, 2009).
A second conclusion that can be drawn by taking into account the variety of subtypes of laws here
identified is that psychological studies have given rather scarce attention to the various practices of the
public sphere governed by laws that target professional groups. There are numerous sustainability laws
which enforce new practices in the recycling of electric and electronic residues (e.g., Directive
2002/96/EC making producers responsible for the collection of residues), or in the construction of
buildings for reasons of energy performance (e.g., Directive 2002/91/EC) or in energy production,
stimulating renewable sources (Directive 2003/30/EC). How are these laws devised? What values do
they try to balance and whose responsibilities do they remodel? Who were the groups able to help
shape them and those that were not? How do all of these questions affect the legitimacy attributed to
the laws by a society? These are also important subjects to study for understanding the “psychological
citizen” (Moghaddam, 2008) and how many of the tasks he/she performs are coachieved with their
groups and respond to intergroup dynamics. These subjects, as well as a focus on the reception of legal
innovations, can also be an important complement to the various policy recommendations recently
issued by the APA task force on the interface between psychology and climate change.
To summarize, this article suggested that a political psychology interested in understanding social
change supported by legal innovation needs to consider that, because not all action is discursive,

15. Change and Resistance to Legal Innovation 119
sometimes a discourse successfully aligned with the core values of the legal innovations can be a form
of resisting altering practices. The article furthermore suggested that in their relation with innovative
laws and regulations, people, groups, and institutions try to push and redefine the borders of what these
laws and regulations allow. They do this through a number of subtle, creative, and recurrent resistance
strategies, which testify to their meta-knowledge about the limits of resistance.
For research, this means that examining resistance should not be only searching for active
protest and collective action regarding the new laws, but also exploring whether or not subtler forms
of resistance systematically emerge associated to specific laws, groups, and contexts. This would
allow for the construction of a cartography of socially acceptable forms of resistance, helpful for
understanding how new laws, as aspects of the normative system, are incorporated by the psycho-
logical citizen (Moghaddam, 2008). This incorporation might occur differently if the laws belong to
different types.
The above analyses also show that the proposed typology, by identifying different types of laws,
and hence facilitating the detailed examination of each type, was instrumental in demonstrating that
legal innovation is in fact not a unitary phenomenon. This, in turn, recommends future systematic
comparisons of the varieties of prosustainability behavior regulated by laws of different types.
Therefore, the present typology can be the basis for a future meta-analysis comparing predictors and
processes for each subtype, instead of either neglecting some and/or analyzing very different
behaviors and practices as if they were all the same. Now that studies about these topics have
accumulated, this meta-analysis would help researchers attain a broader perspective of what con-
tributes to accelerating or slowing down change lead by different types of legal innovation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Paula Castro, Departamento de Psi-
cologia Social e das Organizações, Edifício ISCTE-IUL, Av. das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisboa,
Portugal. E-mail: Paula.Castro@iscte.pt
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