Glossary
Policy categories
What are policy categories?
Policy categories are the seven kinds of enabling action around the outside of the Behaviour Change Wheel: communication and marketing, guidelines, fiscal measures, regulation, legislation, environmental and social planning, and service provision.
How it fits the framework
Policies enable or support interventions; they are distinct from intervention functions. More than one policy can support the same function. Classifying a policy does not establish that it will work or that it should be used in a particular jurisdiction.
The seven categories
The categories in the original paper distinguish different institutional actions:
- Communication and marketing: using media, such as a public information campaign.
- Guidelines: written recommendations or requirements for practice, such as treatment protocols.
- Fiscal measures: changing costs through taxation, such as increasing a product’s duty.
- Regulation: setting rules for conduct, including voluntary advertising agreements.
- Legislation: making or changing laws, such as a legal sales prohibition.
- Environmental and social planning: shaping physical or social surroundings, such as town planning.
- Service provision: providing services, such as workplace support.
In this classification, a practice document is a guideline, an agreement setting conduct rules is regulation, and an enacted law is legislation. Actual initiatives may use several categories.
Illustrative example
Imagine a town choosing environmental restructuring as an intervention function: it wants to change the street environment to make cycling practical. Environmental planning could specify a connected cycle route; legislation could establish the legal changes needed to allocate road space. These are different enabling policies supporting the same intended change to the environment. Providing bicycles or communicating route information could add other interventions to the wider initiative. This is an illustration of classification, not a report that the measures increased cycling.
Why policy categories matter
Choosing an intervention leaves a practical question: what institutional action will make it possible? Policy categories help organize that delivery question.
The original Behaviour Change Wheel paper provides this definition and the relationships between categories.