Green Consumers and Climate Policy: Reconciling Ostrom and Nyborg, Howarth and Brekke

Abstract

Given the global public good properties of climate change mitigation, mitigation e orts have to rely on the willingness of individuals to voluntarily contribute to this public good, either under the form of "green" consumer behavior or through the acceptance of costly climate policy. This paper discusses and reconciles two seminal contributions identifying the rationales for voluntary e orts toward climate change mitigation. Based on the existing literature, it confirms that conditional cooperation may respond to perceived e ectiveness and social norms, as suggested by the theory. When the social norm is not visible, conditional cooperation may rely on general beliefs of trustworthiness, i.e. trust. As a result, the conceptual framework of this paper supports the idea of reciprocal countries, thus contributing to endogenize the participation of countries to emissions abatement e orts and to international climate agreements.

Carbon offsets out of the woods? The acceptability of domestic vs. international reforestation programmes

“…All these studies find indeed a positive effect on the demand for carbon offsets for variables very similar to our measure of beliefs about others' behaviour, namely, and respectively, "expected cooperation", "expected share of offset customers in society" and "expectation of society". Along with related literature showing similar patterns for other climate-friendly behaviours, this evidence is used to support the existence of conditional cooperation in the climate commons (Carattini 2015). Not surprisingly for a lab experiment, even if with a relatively large sample, none of the other covariates reaches the standard thresholds for statistical significance.…”

“…In this respect, a recent study analyses the reasons of ecological and environmental economists for participating in the official offsetting programmes of their respective academic conferences, showing that the main ethical concern expressed by conference participants is rather related to moral licensing, i.e. the implications of encouraging carbon-intensive lifestyle by supporting the use of carbon offsets (Carattini andTavoni 2016, cf. also Anderson 2012).…”