Can payments-for-ecosystem-services change social norms?

Tobias Bähr, Adriana Bernal-Escobar and Meike Wollni

Ecological Economics, 2025, vol. 228, issue C

Abstract: Exposure to economic incentives such as payments for ecosystem services (PES) can change intrinsic motivations to act pro-environmentally. These so-called crowding effects in PES have been shown to affect pro-environmental behavior of PES-receivers. It is, however, unclear if social norms toward pro-environmental behavior are also susceptible to crowding effects in PES and how these changes could influence pro-environmental behavior in the larger population. We design and implement a modified dictator game with Costa Rican oil palm smallholders to test if crowding effects can change social norms by affecting injunctive normative beliefs of PES-receivers and subsequently the pro-environmental behavior of non-PES-receivers through peer influence. Our results indicate that next to crowding-in pro-environmental behavior of PES-receivers, PES also improve PES-receivers' injunctive normative beliefs toward the behavior. Although we cannot link this improvement to an increase in pro-environmental behavior in non-PES-receivers, peer-to-peer communication of injunctive normative beliefs against pro-environmental behavior does reduce non-PES-receivers' pro-environmental behavior. Jointly, these effects highlight the potential of crowding effects in PES to change social norms.

Keywords: PES; Motivational crowding; Social norms; Oil palm; Costa Rica (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924003653
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:228:y:2025:i:c:s0921800924003653

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2024.108468

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 ().