I am happy to announce that my review article “Social Norms with Punishment and Environmental Policy” is forthcoming in the International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics.

In this article I explain social norms with punishment mostly from an economist’s perspective, how they emerge and how they diffuse through society. I then investigate the particular role that these social norms play for the environment, looking at both the theoretical literature as well as the empirical results. Following that I discuss the reasons for which governmental intervention is necessary when it comes to dealing with social norms and the environment. I also place emphasis on the steps that policy makers need to take in order to internalize both the externalities from the collective action problem, and also those from the social norm. In addition, I discuss research gaps and provide suggestions for researchers that are interested in dealing with the joint study of collective action problems and social norms.

You can download the paper HERE.

Social norms are the bedrock, or as Elster (1989) noted, the cement of our society. They influence many of our choices and our actions. In the absence of public policy, they are a welcomed means to deal with externalities and institutional failures, especially in case of environmental problems. They help solve Prisoner’s Dilemmas and aid us in coordinating on the best equilibria of cooperation problems. And yet, while they sometimes provide an immediate solution, they also sometimes create more problems than they solve, especially when social norms do not evolve due to an inherent need, but simply for arbitrary reasons. In that case, they may lead to sub-optimal equilibria.

Social norms can help to internalize some of the externalities that we, for example, face in environmental problems, but, as norms arise from social interactions themselves, they often cannot fully internalize the externalities. For this reason it is useful to rely on public policy in order to bring society closer to the first best solution by carefully addressing both the collective action problem and its interplay with the social norm. In this article I provide an overview of some of the generally accepted views of social norms, how they emerge and how they diffuse through society. In particular, I focus on social norms with punishment. I then discuss the role of social norms for the environment, both from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. I follow this up with a discussion of what government policies need to take care of when they try to address both environmental collective action problems and the social norms that are relevant in these cases. In addition, I discuss what are current research gaps and suggest future research directions for the interplay between social norms, the environment and public policy.