Abstract:
Digital platforms are considered influential
for advocacy, awareness, and collective action on
environmental issues through hashtags and online
campaigns. However, in everyday life, this digital
environmental activism does not always translate into
environmentally responsible behavior. This discrepancy
raises an important question: why do people endorse
environmental causes online but struggle to adopt
sustainable habits offline? To explore this, the study
adopted an integrative review methodology to synthesize
existing evidence on sustainable behavior change in
everyday life initiated by digital campaigns and
engagement on global environmental issues such as
plastic pollution, water conservation, recycling,
sustainable consumption, and biodiversity protection. To
capture multidisciplinary evidence, literature was
searched from 2015 to 2026 across The Directory of Open
Access Journals (DOAJ), Google Scholar, Semantic
Scholars, and other publicly available and published
policy reports on the portals of national ministries and
UN agencies. A thematic synthesis grounded in moral
licensing and the theory of planned behavior was
conducted to study what psychological and social factors
contribute to the gap between online advocacy and offline
behavior. Our findings are discussed in three interrelated
themes to study this disconnect: a) convenience over
commitment, b) digital participation in environmental
campaigns as symbolic participation, and c) can
awareness alone change behavior? The study suggested
the significance of moving beyond awareness-driven
campaigns towards behavior-change communication
(BCC), as online environmental activism may foster
awareness and symbolic engagement temporarily; yet, to
translate the initiatives into meaningful and sustainable
ways, the review proposed that a BCC-informed LIFE
pathway may help future empirical evidence to study how
digital environmental activism embedded with BCC
principles can support persistent behavioral change in
real-life settings.
