Preference-directed regulation when ethical environmental policy choices are formed with limited information

Abstract

Preference-directed regulation (PDR) can supplement traditional environmental policies through frequent regulatory revision (Livermore, 2007). Stakeholders can use PDR to garner popular support for a specific policy. By providing individuals with information that augments their opinions about the effectiveness of a policy at driving environmental outcomes, stakeholders can induce preference switching in favor of or in detriment to a specific policy. This paper documents the extent to which this is true using cross-sectional data from an original national survey where individuals were asked to choose one of three policies aimed at reducing the number of products manufactured in environmentally damaging ways. Proxies for policy-specific opinions about the effectiveness of each policy are extracted from the data and form the central focus of inducing preference switching. PDR is operationalized by exogenously augmenting individual opinions via counterfactual simulations within a limited information discrete choice model. The results demonstrate that the extent of preference switching depends not only on the relative change in opinion for a specific policy, but that different forms of PDR may be more effective at inducing preference switching. The substitution patterns arising from the counterfactual simulations are further explained by analytically demonstrating the mitigation of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives property endemic to traditional multinomial choice models (i.e., full information). Additional empirical results are documented by comparing the results to a full information model, including downward bias in mean utility levels and individual-level preference switching across the limited and full information conditional choice utilities.

Environmental and land defenders: Global patterns and determinants of repression

“…In such contexts, government authorities and corporations are frequently unwilling to follow the praxis of negotiated conflict settlement, while some defenders and their movements refuse to back down on the premise that sustained contestation will further erode abuses of power, even if at the cost of deadly repression. The cases study literature suggests that likelihood of killings of environmental and land defenders thus seem particularly acute in middle-income countries with semi-authoritarian regimes, a recent history of armed conflicts and/or high homicides rates, and a high prevalence of conflicts around resource exploitation projects, as seen in Latin America (see Bebbington and Bury, 2013;Temper et al, 2015;Jeffords and Thompson, 2016;McNeish, 2018;Middeldorp and Le Billon, 2019). Butt et al (2019) have shown that weak rule of lawbased on the World Justice Project index -correlates with higher rates of environmental and land defender killings, echoing more general findings that the most significant variable increasing political killings besides civil war is a lack of judicial independence (Hill and Jones, 2014).…”

“…Such high-level initiatives reflect a growing concern about the rise of anti-environmental movements and their backing not only by many conservative governments but also left-wing 'neo-extractivist' regimes (Rowell, 2017;Tilzey, 2019). 2 A growing body of scholarly literature is more systematically studying the persecution of environmental defenders to better understand risk factors (Clark, 2009;Jeffords and Thompson, 2016;Butt et al, 2019;Middeldorp and Le Billon, 2019;Scheidel et al, 2020). The case study literature suggests that killings of environmental and land defenders are particularly prominent in countries experiencing high levels of inequality and corruption, historical marginalization of Indigenous and peasant communities, a liberalization of foreign and private investment into landbased sectors, weak rule of law and recent reversals in partial democratization processes taking place within a broader context of high homicidal violence and impunity rates (Middeldorp and Le Billon, 2019).…”

“…The case study literature suggests that killings of environmental and land defenders are particularly prominent in countries experiencing high levels of inequality and corruption, historical marginalization of Indigenous and peasant communities, a liberalization of foreign and private investment into landbased sectors, weak rule of law and recent reversals in partial democratization processes taking place within a broader context of high homicidal violence and impunity rates (Middeldorp and Le Billon, 2019). So far, statistical analyses have provided evidence for that at the country level there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between number of killings and per capita income level (Jeffords and Thompson, 2016) and a positive correlation between killings weak rule of law (Butt et al, 2019).…”