The Potential and Limitations of Behaviourally Informed Legal Intervention to Advance the Sustainable Development Goals

This paper examines how insights from behavioural science can inform legal interventions aimed at advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It illustrates, first, how behavioural science departs from more traditional legal approaches grounded in a rationalist understanding of behaviour. Second, it provides three avenues in which behavioural science can inform legal intervention to achieve the SDGs, i. e. behavioural science can provide insights on how individuals actually behave, how legal intervention can be best designed to achieve prosocial objectives, and how regulators can act as choice architects. Finally, this manuscript explores the key challenges and limitations of applying behavioural science to legal intervention to achieve the SDGs, i. e. external validity, internal validity, and normative limitations.