Social capital and willingness-to-pay for coastal defences in south-east England

Nikoleta Jones, Julian R.A. Clark and Chrysovalantis Malesios

Ecological Economics, 2015, vol. 119, issue C, 74-82

Abstract: Globally, it is widely acknowledged that constructing hard engineered coastal defences is both financially and environmentally unsustainable. Here we seek to investigate the willingness of residents in rapidly eroding coastal zones to contribute towards the costs of constructing and maintaining such structures. The originality of this paper is that it provides one of the first analyses of the influence of social capital parameters (social trust, institutional trust, social reciprocity and social networks) on respondents' willingness to pay (WTP). Fieldwork for the study was conducted in Romney Marsh, a low-lying coastal area of south-east England. The findings have substantive public policy implications for coastal management. First is that we demonstrate that while social and institutional trust exerts a positive influence on WTP, the presence of social networks militates against WTP. Secondly while the study found 45.6% of respondents were willing to pay an average monthly premium of £3.53, a high level of refusal to pay was evident among respondents. Thirdly even among those respondents willing to pay, disagreement was expressed over the political–administrative level at which a ‘coastal defence tax’ should be collected.

Keywords: Trust; Networks; Flooding; Coastal defences; WTP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915003146
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:119:y:2015:i:c:p:74-82

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.07.023

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().