Environment for Development Commons Research Themes

URL = http://www.efdinitiative.org/research/commons/themes/themes

Description

"The reason is that we want to explicitly emphasize what is central to our research approach; that we are trying to understand where human management of ecosystems goes wrong and what to do about it. Our themes are:

1: Individual behaviour, cooperation and trust

2: Quality of Life for People and Animals

3: Fairness and Distributional Issues in policy making

4: Governance, policies and sustainable management

Theme 1: Individual behaviour, cooperation and trust

Specific Objectives

The purpose of this theme is to better understand determinants of individual behaviour in social dilemma situations such as voluntary cooperation to reduce overuse of common pool resources and find remedies to increase cooperation.

Overview of Research Theme

The “tragedy of the commons”, Hardin (1968), describes how individuals, acting in their own-self interest, overuse resources resulting e.g. in the collapse of fish populations, irreversible effects on the climate, and forest degradation. However, extensive empirical research by foremost Elinor Ostrom and her research group have over time shown that Hardin’s “tragedy” does not always occur, and as discussed by Dietz et al (2002) there are many examples where resources have been sustained. While many factors have been shown to be important for sustainable management of resources, one basic prerequisite is human cooperation. Several studies in the experimental and behavioural economics literature offer important insights regarding the cooperative behaviour of individuals. One important result is that individuals cooperate in the belief that others will do so (so called conditional cooperation). Both laboratory and field experimental evidence can be found, Gächter 2007; Falk and Fischbacher 2006, Fehr and Gächter 2000, Fischbacher, et al., 2001; Frey and Meier, 2004. Trust has also been shown to be of importance for cooperative behaviour (Gächter et al., 2004). Dasgupta (2009) argues that cooperation is a function of trust, which is determined by beliefs about others behaviour. Thus the link between own contribution and belief about others’ contributions is bridged by “trust”.

In this research theme we will investigate in more detail what determines cooperation, in particular self-control, risk preferences and trust, as well as how institutional design affects cooperation and resource use. The theoretical foundations are recent work in behavioural economics (especially on social preferences) and to some extent in game theory. Data from laboratory and field experiments will be combined with survey data for statistical analysis.

Theme 2: Quality of Life for People and Animals

Specific Objectives

The first aim of this theme is to provide a more systematic knowledge about how environmental quality affects quality of life. The second aim is to analyze whether it is motivated to relax the anthropocentric assumption in economics, and allow for animal suffering to matter intrinsically in normative economic models, and if so to determine how such normative analysis would be affected by this broadening.

Overview of Research Theme

Quality of life has emerged over the last decades as an important area of research in many disciplines. How to best measure quality of life, however, remains an open question. It has become clear that, in spite of their widespread use, monetary socio-economic indicators (such as per capita GNP) are an insufficient measure (see e.g., Frey and Stutzer, 2002). Over the last decades, indicators based on self-reported quality of life have emerged as a valid measure of individual welfare and there is a rapidly growing “economics of happiness” literature examining the impact on quality of life of a variety of factors in addition to traditional income, e.g. age, gender, marital status or unemployment (e.g. Di Tella et al., 2001).

Conventional welfare economics is based on what Sen (1979) denotes welfarism, i.e. that social welfare depends solely on quality of life (utility), as well as anthropocentrism, meaning that it is only human quality of life that counts intrinsically. Both these assumptions, and the latter in particular, are so common that they are often not even mentioned in economic analysis. It is of course still possible that people are willing to pay for reduced animal suffering if their utility is affected through altruistic concern. However, social welfare is then only affected instrumentally, not intrinsically.

Theme 3: Fairness and Distributional Issues in policy making

Specific Objectives

The overall social benefit of an environmental policy can be judged by comparing aggregate costs and benefits. However the actual acceptability of an environmental or resource policy often depends more on the distribution of costs and benefits between households, communities or countries than on aggregate net benefits. The aim of this theme is to better understand how to design management regimes of resources and policy instruments for environmental problems that deal with both efficiency and equity issues.

Overview of Research Theme

The perception of what constitutes a fair distribution of costs (often referred to as effort sharing or burden sharing rules) differs between different countries. In order for a policy to have legitimacy, the resource users or those that in the end have to pay for the policy, should support the policy (Beetham, 1991). One important aspect of the acceptance is the perceived fairness of the policy. One recent example is effort sharing rules in relation to international climate agreements. The most relevant effort sharing rules in relation to international climate negotiations are discussed by e.g. Rose et al. (1998), Torvanger and Ringius (2002), Ringius et al. (2002), and Lange et al (2007). However, it is likely that preferences for design and effort sharing rules are biased. Johansson-Stenman and Konow (2009) denote the discrepancy between the fairness judgements made by a stakeholder and an impartial spectator as a fairness bias. This bias is due to both a self-centred bias, which is a discrepancy that the stakeholder is aware of, and a self-serving bias, which is a distortion of the stakeholders’ beliefs (Konow, 2000).

A particularly important class of distributional issues concerns the distribution of costs and benefits between the present and future generations. Discounting is essential for dealing with allocation of costs over time. Many issues such as the optimal rate of hunting, fishing, climate abatement, nuclear power expansion are essentially determined by the so-called discount rate, which serves as a form of “exchange rate” between future and present costs. It is particularly important for very long run phenomena such as climate change, see e.g. Brekke and Johansson-Stenman (2008), Nordhaus (2007), Sterner and Persson (2008), Stern (2007) and Weitzman (2007a, b).

Theme 4: Governance, policies and sustainable management

Specific Objectives

The objective of this theme is to advance our knowledge of governance systems and how to design policy instruments for management of environmental and natural resources. This is done by analyzing the impact that various governance systems have on self-organization and management of resources such as forests and wildlife and by studying efficiency and equity implications of different policy instruments, such as taxes and tradable permits.

Overview of Research Theme

Global population is growing fast; most of this growth is in poor countries and it poses considerable challenges for resource and environmental management. The design and implementation of policies that respond to economic, ecological and social sustainability are key to enhance the short- and long-term sustainable management of environmental and natural resources. In her general framework for analyzing sustainability of SES (Ostrom, 2009) special attention is given to the importance of the social, economic and political settings, as well as the governance system in shaping the sustainability of the social-ecological system. In this theme we will evaluate the implications of the governance systems in order to feed this back into the design of policies." (http://www.efdinitiative.org/research/commons/themes/themes)