Collaborative Research: Informal risk-sharing and private initiative to mitigate local environmental risks

对于美国成千上万的社区来说，无论是自然环境还是污染环境，都对人类健康构成挑战。这些风险通常是高度局部化的，因此是可以避免的。许多美国人依赖的井水通常低于《安全饮用水法》规定的标准。减少污染物的一种方法是依靠政府减轻这些风险，并通过提供地方公共产品，包括安全饮用水和卫生服务，减少不利后果对福利的影响。然而，政府提供的这种公共产品并不总是足够的。这个项目背后的假设是，这些限制可以通过以下方式克服：(a)利用私人风险来实现更大的合作，建立在约翰·罗尔斯的“无知之幕”概念之上，以促进公共产品的合作；(b)只注重分享私人拥有的资源，从而摆脱公共或私人物品极端的陷阱；(c)探讨信息和社交网络如何加强合作并鼓励私人投资缓解技术。为了验证这些概念，研究人员选择了一个主要的自然灾害作为背景：孟加拉国数百万个私人水井抽取的地下水中砷的有毒水平。提供关于个别风险的信息，在这种情况下是砷的井测试，其方式是鼓励通过共享安全井和安装新的安全井来加强合作和投资。随着公民越来越多地获得水、空气和土壤质量的高分辨率数据，这些发现对美国的环境政策具有重要意义。更具体地说，本研究研究了风险分担和社会网络在感知和缓解当地环境风险中的作用。研究小组侧重于两个方面：增加风险缓解合作和增加风险缓解技术方面的私人投资。由于缺乏政府提供的减少环境风险的资源，本项目所处的环境使得这两个因素变得尤为重要。这项研究首先检验非正规保险是否能够有效地解决当地公共产品供应不足的问题，在非正规保险中，合规主要是由现有的社会结构和互惠规范强制执行的。然后，该团队研究了社交网络如何有助于增加风险缓解技术的合作、采用和投资。为了解这些渠道，本项目探讨了风险信息如何促进更多合作和降低风险。这种相对低成本的方法与孟加拉国政府目前的方法不同，孟加拉国政府目前的方法侧重于覆盖范围有限的昂贵基础设施。这项研究是在孟加拉国农村进行的一项随机对照试验，研究人员在其中随机分配了以下干预措施：(a)事前风险分担，(b)提供风险信息，以及(c)示范低砷中深井。原始数据使研究小组能够测试这些干预措施在缓解努力和减少人群接触砷方面的有效性。实验设计允许记录干预措施的因果影响。研究小组打算与政策制定者和组织分享结果，以便在类似情况下应用这里学到的经验教训。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

For thousands of communities in the United States the environment, natural or contaminated, presents challenges to human health. These risks are often highly localized and therefore avoidable. Many Americans depend on well water that often is below the standards set by regulatory actions pursuant to the Safe Drinking Water Act. One approach to reduce contaminants is to rely on the government to mitigate these risks and reduce the welfare impact of adverse outcomes through the provision of local public goods, including safe drinking water and health services. Government provision of such public goods, however, is not always adequate. The assumptions underlying this project is that such limitations may be overcome by (a) exploiting private risk to achieve greater cooperation, building upon the "veil of ignorance" concept of John Rawls to foster cooperation for public goods; (b) departing from the pitfalls of either extreme of public or private goods only by focusing on sharing of privately-owned resources; and (c) exploring how information and social-networks increase cooperation as well as encouraging private investments in mitigation technologies. To test these concepts, the researchers have chosen as context a major disaster of natural origin: toxic levels of arsenic in groundwater pumped by millions of private wells across Bangladesh. Information on individual risk, in this case well tests for arsenic, are provided in ways that encourage greater cooperation and investment through the sharing of safe wells and the installation of new safe wells. The findings have implications for environmental policy in the United States as high-resolution data on water, air, and soil quality become increasingly accessible to citizens. More specifically, this research studies the role of risk-sharing and social networks in perception and mitigation of local environmental risks. The research team focuses on two aspects: increasing cooperation for risk mitigation and increasing private investment in risk mitigation technology. This project is based in a setting where these two factors become particularly important due to a lack of government-provided resources for reducing environmental risk. The research first tests whether informal insurance, where compliance may be primarily enforced by existing social structure and reciprocity norms, can effectively counter the undersupply of local public goods. Then, the team studies how social-networks can help in increasing cooperation, adoption and investment in risk mitigation technology. To understand the channels, this project explores how information on risk can facilitate more cooperation and risk mitigation. This relatively low-cost approach is different from the current approach of the government of Bangladesh which is focused on expensive infrastructure of limited reach. The study is a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh, where the researchers randomly assign interventions on (a) ex-ante risk sharing, (b) information provision on risk, and (c) the demonstration of intermediate-depth wells which yield low arsenic. The original data allow the research team to test the effectiveness of these interventions in terms of mitigation efforts and reduction in arsenic exposure to the population. The experimental design allows for documentation of the causal impact of the interventions. The research team intends to share the results with policy makers and organizations so that lessons learnt here can be applied in similar settings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.