What Drives the Household's Pro-environmental Behavior? Dfferences in what People Say and Do

Abstract

"Promoting changes in behavior related to natural resources and environmental concerns requires to understand the factors associated. In a context of common pool resources, cooperation is required to overcome social dilemmas, but the understanding of the factors that underlie the behavior is an urgent task. There is considerable evidence on what move the individuals to perform pro-environmental actions. However, since the information about private behaviors is self-reported, produces challenges to analyze in a causal fashion. This paper intends to analyze what intrinsic and extrinsic motivations could explain pro-environmental behaviors. I collect information of households in eight small-urban villages in Colombia and combine it with information from a previous randomize field experiment conducted in these villages. With this data set, there is self-declared behaviors and objective measures of water consumption. I use a propensity score matching to analyze how the motivations affects both. The heterogeneous findings show a contradiction between what the households affirm that they are doing where they are asked and what they are actually doing. Moreover, the anticipated feelings of guilt and anticipated feelings of pride are important drivers to explain pro-environmental behaviors in self-declared behaviors. While the perceived control of behavior and monetary incentives in the observable behavior."