Abstract
The use of plastic bags is one of the major urban planning challenges in Pakistan. Despite the ban in few locations in Pakistan, the consumption of single-use plastic bags is still widespread. Existing evidence suggests that monitoring and enforcement generate deterrence effects, but there are limits to such deterrence, and deterrence itself cannot fully explain all patterns of compliance behavior. Further research is needed to identify additional tools to ensure compliance with environmental regulations.
Shaping the compliance behavior needs both regulatory measures and more innovative information-dissemination-based approaches. One such approach is nudging --- a promising new policy tool, which is relatively less costly, less aggressive, and more effective. The literal meaning of nudging is to coax or gently encourage someone to do something. Nudge interventions can be very effective in an environment of weak enforcement of laws (as is generally the case in Pakistan), which explains why many governments have turned to nudge policy to influence people’s behavior. However, little is known about how to nudge environmental behavior, specifically, how to influence plastic bag consumption behavior in the retail markets in Pakistan.
The scarcity of evidence on the relative effectiveness of enforcement and nudge approaches requires an analysis of the relative effectiveness of the enforcement measures and environmental nudges in generating plastic bag compliance behavior in Pakistan. To ensure that our proposed research is aligned with the best environmental practices and has maximum policy impact, we shall partner with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA-PAK), Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), and World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). We shall measure the effectiveness of a series of policy interventions (regulations and nudges) on the compliance behavior of retailers in Islamabad, Pakistan. The investigation will also focus on the longitudinal aspect of the interventions. We shall analyze how long the impact of enforcement and environmental nudges lasts. We expect our experiment to reveal the extent to which sanctions and nudges affect compliance behavior. The study results will provide guidelines to the regulators to improve plastic bag users’ compliance behavior. Generating evidence regarding the effect of creating a norm in an environment of weak enforcement will be the most important contribution of this study.
The project is expected to shape environmentally sustainable behavior, facilitate the implementation of public policies, and suggest an optimal degree of enforcement and nudging to achieve required compliance behavior. The mix of academic and policy-related expertise of the research team is expected to make the proposed study technically rigorous and relevant to national needs. The project also addresses relevant considerations, especially related to sectoral collaborations and methodological ones and suggests a methodology that should yield policy relevant information. It will also help generalize the finding in other areas of Pakistan. For instance, involving the Environmental Protection Agency, SDPI, and international stakeholders such as WWF in the current project will ensure that the project’s objectives align with the national environmental policies and are informed by best practices in the developed world.