How individual decisions influence global outcomes is a fundamental question in the social sciences. Societies across the globe face important challenges. Among these are climate change. For instance, the extent of people’s civic engagement determines the efficacy of neighbourhoods, communities, and political entities in developing and applying environmental policies.

How can we solve these challenges? Social norms, which can be defined as informal behavioural rules that are supported by empirical and normative expectations and potentially backed by enforcement, seem to be an important and promising way of helping solving these issues. Social norms and social interactions influence the spread and resilience of those policies. In fact, when we try to understand the uptake of a climate change policy we can no longer focus on how people would behave individually. Rather, we have to consider how single agents interact within the society. Civic engagement as expression of cooperative behaviour is one of the most important measures for the stability of the society. In light of this interpretation the main goal of our work is to study the socio-economic issues associated with the Climate Change Challenge that is, to study how to develop and sustain environmental-friendly social norms in society. To do so we try to investigate, by the mean of a long run and online experiment, two main goals: 1) the role of social learning and evolution of social norms in feeding dysfunctional macro-behaviours; 2) the specific role of individuals’ expectations in learning the social norms governing each group and to understand, once a norm exists, under which conditions behavioural spill-overs actually matter in the endorsement of a cooperative action.