Special Track
0e. Economic Instruments and Policies for Sustainability
Track Chairs:
María Alejandra Vélez. Universidad de los Andes School of Management, Colombia. mavelez@uniandes.edu.co
Jorge H. García. Universidad de los Andes School of Management, Colombia. j.h.garcia@cicero.oslo.no
Goals and objectives of the track
The implementation of policy instruments, ranging from command and control to incentive based approaches, is crucial in achieving sustainable development goals. Policy design and policy assessments have often focused on the effectiveness and efficiency features of the instruments at hand. Typically, an instrument is deemed promising or successful if it achieves (or can potentially achieve) a well-defined objective at minimum cost. While there is a relatively wide range of instruments available for policy making, the set of instruments that is implementable in practice is relatively small. Interest groups often succeed in blocking policies that are otherwise beneficial for society at large.
In recent years, a vibrant literature on the unintended consequences of policies for the management of the environment and natural resources has emerged. Policies are not implemented in a vacuum and, more often than not, have impacts on untargeted domains: payments for Environmental Services (PES) and fuel taxes are likely to have distributional impacts; wetland protection does not only protect wildlife and fauna but it also provides ancillary benefits such as water quality enhancement; forest protection in one region may trigger logging in a nearby area (carbon leakage); price instruments may crowd-out social norms or intrinsic motivation; a public campaign that encourages recycling may induce sustainable behavior, broadly defined.
This track welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions addressing the unintended consequences of instruments and policies for the management of the environment and natural resources.
Contributions may address:
- spillovers;
- distributional effects;
- crowding-out (in) of social norms or intrinsic motivation;
- untargeted environmental services (e.g. carbon leakage);
- other unintended negative effects of policy;
- other ancillary benefits of policy.
María Alejandra Vélez is Associate Professor of the School of Management, Universidad de Los Andes. Ph.D. in Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Former postdoc at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University, 2006-2008. Her research focus on decision-making and institutional design concerning developing country environmental and natural resource issues. Using economic field experiments, she has been studying local resource sharing and collective action dilemmas of rural villagers in developing countries and decision-making under uncertainty and scarcity. Recently she is exploring different institutional designs to incentivize small-scale gold mining formalization. Another ongoing line of research examines the impacts of collective property-rights regimes on institutional changes, landscape, and welfare of Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific Coast.
Jorge H García´s work has dealt with the design and evaluation of environmental policy in a number of areas including energy, forestry, manufacturing and transport. Jorge has experience from working on environmental issues in different countries and contexts. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in 2007 and later became a researcher at the United States Environmental Protection Agency US EPA. Since 2011 Jorge has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research - Oslo (CICERO). He has recently been visiting faculty at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana - Bogotá. From January 2017 Jorge will be a faculty member at Universidad de los Andes School of Management.
