Joseph Arvai

Motivating Sustainable Food Choices: The Role of Nudges, Value Orientation, and Information Provision

Small, everyday changes in people’s behavior can have significant positive environmental impacts. To this end, the research reported here focused on the role of an asymmetric intervention (a “nudge”) in motivating choices with positive environmental outcomes. The context of this research was motivating proenvironmental food choice in campus dining halls. An experiment was conducted in which a default menu, presenting only appealing or unappealing meat-free meal options, was compared with more conventional menu configurations. The use of a default menu increased the probability that study participants would choose a meat-free meal option, and this probability increased when appealing default meal options were provided. Neither the provision of information on the menus nor the proenvironmental value orientation and worldview of participants contributed to the logistic model. These results suggest that default-based interventions can be important tools in motivating proenvironmental behavior and can serve to complement information and education efforts over the long term.

Risk Management in a Developing Country Context: Improving Decisions About Point‐of‐Use Water Treatment Among the Rural Poor in Africa

More than 1 billion people, the vast majority of which live in the developing world, lack basic access to clean water for domestic use. For this reason, finding and promoting effective and sustainable solutions for the provision of reliable clean water in developing nations has become a focus of several public health and international development efforts. Even though several means of providing centrally located sources of clean water in developing communities exist, the severity and widespread nature of the water problem has led most development agencies and sanitation experts to strongly advocate the use of point-of-use treatment systems alongside whatever source of water people regularly use. In doing so, however, development practitioners have been careful to point out that any interventions or infrastructure regarding water safety and human health must also adhere to one of the central principles of international development: to facilitate more democratic and participatory models of decision making and governance. To this end, the research reported here focused on the development of a deliberative risk management framework for involving affected stakeholders in decisions about POU water treatment systems. This research, which was grounded in previous studies of structured decision making, took place in two rural villages in the East African nation of Tanzania.

Geospatial Technologies to Improve Urban Energy Efficiency

Abstract : The HEAT (Home Energy Assessment Technologies) pilot project is a FREE Geoweb mapping service, designed to empower the urban energy efficiency movement by allowing residents to visualize the amount and location of waste heat leaving their homes and communities as easily as clicking on their house in Google Maps. HEAT incorporates Geospatial solutions for residential waste heat monitoring using Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) and Canadian built Thermal Airborne Broadband Imager technology (TABI-320) to provide users with timely, in-depth, easy to use, location-specific waste-heat information; as well as opportunities to save their money and reduce their green-house-gas emissions. We first report on the HEAT Phase I pilot project which evaluates 368 residences in the Brentwood community of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and describe the development and implementation of interactive waste heat maps, energy use models, a Hot Spot tool able to view the 6+ hottest locations on each home and a new

Five propositions for improving decision making about the environment in developing communities: insights from the decision sciences.

Decisions focused on managing natural resources in developing areas present some of the most imposing challenges to policy makers, scientists, and stakeholders alike. The response of policy makers and the technical community in the face of these challenges has been significant. However, our experiences as researchers and facilitators of group planning and decision-making processes have left us concerned about the lack of attention devoted to supporting the underlying processes used to make these complex decisions. To this end, we present five propositions based on work in the decision sciences that we believe stand out as essential for improving decision-making processes in developing communities.

The end of risk communication as we know it

According to the US National Research Council, risk communication ought to be viewed as a dialogue among people conducted to help facilitate a more accurate understanding of risks and, related, the decisions they may make to manage them. But, in spite of this widely accepted perspective on risk communication, there is often a disconnect between how it is defined and how it is practiced. Rather than focusing on a true dialogue aimed at improving risk assessments and risk management decisions, risk communication is often viewed as means of simply educating people about existing risk assessments so that, on their own, they might make (or contribute to) better risk management decisions. More worrisome, risk communication is still often seen as a means of ‘correcting’ misconceptions about, or perceptions of, risk; in other words, risk communication is used as a vehicle for attempting to align lay perceptions with their expertly assessed severity. In this paper, I argue that risk communication must become more decision-focused if it is to meet the objectives set forth – in 1989 – by the US National Research Council.

Mental models research to inform community outreach for a campus recycling program

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a better understanding of the state of knowledge of students and faculty on the Michigan State University (MSU) campus; identify relevant gaps in knowledge and misconceptions about recycling; and provide recommendations regarding how these gaps and misconceptions may be addressed through education and outreach.Design/methodology/approach – Using mental models analysis, the current state of knowledge possessed by students and faculty was compared with a comprehensive inventory of on‐campus recycling procedures and opportunities.Findings – By combining data from individual mental models elicited from students and faculty members, an overall mental model that depicted the frequency with which subjects understood MSU‐specific recycling concepts was developed. This composite model, and the accompanying statistical analysis, revealed important gaps – on part of both students and faculty – in understanding for several key recycling concepts that are relevant to e...

Using choice experiments to understand household tradeoffs regarding pineapple production and environmental management in Costa Rica

Choices among environmental management alternatives involve tradeoffs where, for example, the benefits of environmental protection may be offset by economic costs or welfare losses to individual agents. Understanding individual or household-level preferences regarding these tradeoffs is not always straightforward, and it often requires an analysis of choices under alternative scenarios. A household survey was used to gather data for a choice experiment, where respondents were asked to choose among pairs of alternative management scenarios about pineapple production in Costa Rica. The experimental design consisted of six attributes that varied on between two and five attribute levels, and the experiment and accompanying survey were administered orally in Spanish. The results show that respondents are willing to make tradeoffs with respect to the management attributes in order to see an overall improvement in environmental quality. Respondents were willing to accept a moderate level of pesticide application, presumably in exchange for paying a lower cost or seeing a gain in another area, such as monitoring or soil conservation. Buffer zones were significant only in the case of large farms. The results have implications for policy decisions that aim to reflect public attitudes, particularly the aspects of pineapple production that matter most to people living near pineapple plantations. The study also highlights the effectiveness of the choice experiment approach in examining household preferences about environmental management in a rural development context.

Structuring decisions about energy in developing communities: an example from Canada's north

Decisions about energy in developing communities are challenging from a technical standpoint, and because of the unique characteristics that typify them, e.g. limited infrastructure and government budgets, complex social and political arrangements, and economic vulnerability. Against the backdrop of these challenges, the government of Canadas Northwest Territories (NWT) is attempting to reform the regions energy system. This paper provides insights from the decision sciences, stemming from our work on the NWTs energy planning process, about how to structure decisions about energy development and delivery so as to effectively meet a range of stakeholders’ objectives in a transparent and inclusive manner.

The promise of asymmetric interventions for addressing risks to environmental systems

Recent studies suggest that people the world over are becoming increasingly concerned about the health of environmental systems. However, research has also shown that many people still fail to make decisions that will result in even small behavioral changes that, when aggregated across society, might lead to positive environmental consequences. This paper reports the results of three naturalistic experiments—each involving asymmetric interventions and set in the context of real-world decisions—aimed at helping people to make decisions at the individual level that, when scaled up, can help to address risks to environmental systems.

Structuring international development decisions: confronting trade-offs between land use and community development in Costa Rica

For more than half a century, research and practice in international development has focused on improving the quality of life of people living in developing regions of the world. Recently, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers have recognized the need to blend insights from experts and community stakeholders in development decisions. Research in the decision sciences tells us that these kinds of multiparty and multiattribute decisions are extremely challenging. However, recent experience using structured decision-making (SDM) approaches suggests that the quality of both expert and stakeholder input, and resulting decisions, can be improved by ensuring that people address a series of basic principles relating to identifying objectives and their associated attributes, estimating the consequences of proposed actions, and directly confronting trade-offs that arise during the evaluation of management alternatives. In this paper, we provide an overview of SDM and then discuss a research initiative aimed at applying the approach to a pressing international development problem in rural Costa Rica: management of the lucrative but also environmentally destructive pineapple industry. The objectives of this research were twofold: First, we sought to help inform policy decisions by eliciting land management preferences regarding the pineapple industry from people living in communities surrounding plantations. Second, we evaluated the effectiveness of the SDM approach in a developing community context.