Environmental Management

Overview of the Approach

In supporting healthy and safe campus environments and reducing substance abuse among college students, the Higher Education Center for Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Violence Prevention promotes a comprehensive approach termed environmental management. This approach is grounded in the social ecological model of public health that acknowledges and attempts to address a broad array of factors that influence individual health decisions and behaviors on the institutional, community, and public policy levels, in addition to those at the individual and group levels.

Elements of Environmental Management

Motivations for engaging in high-risk behaviors vary from one person to the next, as do the motivations for changing or curbing those behaviors. Environmental management seeks to bring about behavior change through multiple channels, both promoting positive behaviors and norms and also discouraging high-risk behaviors. It encompasses a range of activities from environmental change that includes policy changes at the campus and community level to intervention and treatment programs aimed at students displaying signs of distress to education and awareness activities aimed at groups known to be at higher risk for engaging in problem behaviors, and finally, to health protection programs that aim to minimize the harm incurred by problem behaviors.

While environmental management encompasses a spectrum of programs and interventions from primary prevention to early intervention and treatment, it stresses the prevention of high-risk behavior through changes to the environment in which students make decisions about their alcohol and other drug use.

See Also: Application of the Environmental Management Approach