central america | Policy design
Impact of uncertainty and pro-social attitudes on household’s solid waste management decisions: starting from scratch in a LDC
Solid waste management is a severe environmental problem in many urban areas in the developing world. In particular, Costa Rica has been faced with an increasing amount of waste generation, with one quarter of total waste being collected and disposed by households only. Therefore, a good understanding of households as the source of waste generation and their response to policy incentives is necessary to achieve effective and efficient environmental protection (Bartone and Bernstein, 1993; Pearce and Turner, 1994).
In order to know which specific policies can be implemented to reduce the environmental impact of household disposal behavior, our goal is to investigate the importance and emergence of pro-social attitudes on households’ willingness to contribute to solid waste management and recycling activities. This involves giving attention to both, informal norms and uncertainty and their impact on self- or other-regarding behavior. Not only are we interested in the separate effects of concerns for social reputation but also on their interaction with uncertainty. So far, very few studies have experimentally analyzed the effect of uncertainty to examine concrete instances of pro-social behavior in social dilemma situations. Additionally, policy recommendations focus solely on the supply side of waste management policy in the form of investments in the formal and informal sectors. A discussion on pro-social behavior and its relationship to institutional quality is left out and solutions addressing demand management measures are not offered.
EfD Authors
Keywords
Centers
- central america
Type of publication
- Project
Reference
Alpízar, Francisco and Elisabeth Gsottbauer (2010) "Impact of uncertainty and pro-social attitudes on household’s solid waste management decisions: starting from scratch in a LDC" EfD 2010 projectProjects
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