MdM Keynote Speaker Series: "Behavioural and community field experiments on local institutions for managing water scarcity", by Francisco Alpízar

Prof. Francisco Alpízar, from Wageningen University and Research, will be giving a keynote talk on “Behavioural and community field experiments on local institutions for managing water scarcity”. 

MdM Keynote Speaker Series 2024 
 

Title: “Behavioural and community field experiments on local institutions for managing water scarcity”.   

Speaker:  Prof. Francisco Alpízar, Wageningen University and Research 
 

Date: Monday, 8^th of April 2024
Time: from 12:00 to 13:00
Venue: Room Z/023 - Z/022 and online https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86979096960?pwd=cmEvdmlSN08wOTh3Mk05VlRvWXRyUT09
 

Francisco Alpízar is Professor and Chair of the Environmental and Natural Resource Economics Group at Wageningen University. Until 2019, he was Research Director and Principal Investigator at CATIE, a multilateral research institute based in Costa Rica. In 2005, he founded and directed the Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program, which ran for 12 years and trained hundreds of Latin American environmental economists. In 2007 he contributed to the creation of the Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative and served as EfD Center Director for Central America for 8 years. Francisco is still linked to the EfD Initiative in his role as Scientific Program Lead in charge of the Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCOPE) Collaborative Program.   Alpizar’s work has explored incentive-based approaches to improve the private and public management of natural resources, with a particular focus on climate change, biodiversity and developing countries. He is particularly interested in how firms and individuals react to policies and institutions, in different contexts and given (in)formal norms and values.  He has undertaken studies using behavioural, experimental and nonmarket valuation methods.

For decades, government agencies and nongovernmental organizations have invested in programs aimed at alleviating poverty and protecting the environment. Whether these investments actually work and achieve both goals has been widely debated by scholars. Experiments involving randomized controlled trials can play an important role in this debate. When done well, these permit credible causal inferences and can be designed to directly test competing assumptions about how the world works. In this lecture Prof. Alpízar will present the results of a series of experimental studies centred around water management by local communities and water use by households in those communities. Water scarcity is a global problem that can be compounded by inefficient water management, underinvestment in infrastructure, underpricing of water use, underenforcement of user rules, and inefficient water use by households. These challenges have been explored using carefully designed field experiments at both community and household level.