Collaborative Research: Do Institutions Affect the Attitudes and Behavior of Constituents? Evidence from an Environmental Management Program in India

这项拟议的研究将调查社会科学中的一些最基本的谜题：制度如何以及在多大程度上影响个人的态度和行为？具体地说，这个项目将考察个人对新的地方资源治理计划的接触和参与如何影响他们的环境态度和行为。这项研究的地理位置是印度喜马拉雅山脉。这项研究将使用印度喜马恰尔邦社区级环境机构的变化作为感兴趣的因果变量。这些新机构是喜马拉雅邦政府在世界银行的支持下于2006年底作为中喜马拉雅流域发展项目的一部分引入的。该项目创建了村庄流域发展委员会，以设计和执行使用和管理村庄森林的新规则。这项研究将试图解释该项目新机构的实施和参与如何改变村民对森林和环境的态度和相关活动。拟议的研究将比较治疗村(即项目的那些部分)和对照村(即不参与治疗的类似村庄)中的人在治疗前和治疗后的机构、态度和行为方面的措施。该项目的数据收集工作包括在两个时间段内对治疗和比较村庄的村民进行调查，由村官员填写问卷，以及收集关于研究地点的现有官方信息。由此产生的数据集将包括关于受访者特征(人口统计、家庭位置、经济状况、网络联系、环境态度、机构参与、森林活动)和村庄特征(人口规模、市场渗透率、森林状况、民间机构、空间数据)的信息。研究设计包括在两个时间点采访相同的人。在该项目在其中30个村庄实施之前，调查人员于2006年初对60个村庄的2224名受访者进行了基线调查。目前的项目将收集和分析第二波数据，以衡量治疗后机构、态度和行为的变化。总而言之，这些数据将使人们能够做出强有力的推论，说明新制度在多大程度上导致了态度和行为的变化，以及哪些因素在带来这些变化方面最重要。关于制度如何以及是否影响个人态度以及态度和行为之间的关系的问题具有深刻的理论意义，社会科学中的许多学者对此存在分歧。一些人认为态度在很大程度上是固定的，并由结构性背景决定，而另一些人则认为态度具有很强的可塑性。每种观点都隐含着一种与政治行为相关的非常不同的因果机制。态度和行为是如何联系在一起的，这是学者们分歧的另一个问题。在政治学内部，有一场关于偏好形成和改变的相关问题的健康辩论。拟议中的研究将有助于这些理论讨论，通过经验证明，一套特定的制度改变了一类重要的态度和相关行为的程度。个人对环境的看法及其保护和养护自然资源的意愿的差异可能对养护政策的成功和与环境管理机构有关的执行费用产生重大影响。在许多发展中国家声称它们正在下放与森林和水等环境资源以及卫生和教育等发展领域有关的决策和执法机构的全球背景下，了解个人态度和行为的驱动因素对于权力下放政策的成功至关重要。这项研究还将探讨政策问题，如如何设计和确定对态度和行为产生重大影响的机构；产生一个小组数据集，可用来检验关于政策干预的效力、态度改变以及发展和环境保护的政治经济学的一系列假设；以及产生关于一类普遍和日益受欢迎的地方治理机构的实质性知识。最后，该研究项目将加强印度和美国学者和组织之间的合作，并将通过参与密歇根大学、伊利诺伊大学、乌尔巴纳-香槟分校和印度巴兰普尔的KLBDAV妇女学院的研究项目，促进对研究生的培训。

The proposed research will investigate some of the most basic puzzles in the social sciences: How and to what extent do institutions affect individual attitudes and behavior? Specifically, this project will examine how individuals' exposure to and involvement in a new local resource governance program affects their environmental attitudes and behaviors. The geographic location of the research is the Indian Himalaya. The research will use changes in community-level environmental institutions in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh as the causal variable of interest. These new institutions were introduced as part of the Mid-Himalayan Watershed Development Project by the Himachal Pradesh state government with support from the World Bank in late 2006. The Project created Village Watershed Development Committees to design and enforce new rules for using and managing village forests. This research will attempt to explain how the implementation of and participation in the program's new institutions changed villagers' attitudes about and activities related to forests and the environment. The proposed research will compare pre- and post-treatment measures of institutions, attitudes, and behavior between people in treatment villages (i.e., those part of the Project) and comparison villages (i.e., similar villages that were not part of the treatment). The project's data collection efforts involve surveys of villagers in treatment and comparison villages in two time periods, questionnaires completed by village officials, and collection of available official information about the study sites. The resulting dataset will include information about respondent characteristics (demographics, household location, economic circumstances, network ties, environmental attitudes, institutional participation, activities in forests) and village characteristics (population size, market penetration, forest conditions, civic institutions, spatial data). The research design involves interviewing the same individuals at two points in time. The investigators conducted baseline surveys in early 2006 for 2224 respondents across 60 villages before the Project was implemented in 30 of these villages. The current project will collect and analyze a second wave of data to measure (changes in) post-treatment institutions, attitudes and behavior. Collectively, these data will permit make powerful inferences about the extent to which new institutions caused attitudes and behavior to change, and about what factors were most important in bringing about those changes. Questions about how and whether institutions affect individual attitudes and the relationship between attitudes and behavior have deep theoretical implications that divide many scholars in the social sciences. Whereas some believe attitudes to be largely fixed and determined by structural context, others see attitudes as highly malleable. Each view implies a very different causal mechanism relating to political behavior. How attitudes and behavior are connected is another question on which scholars are divided. Within political science, there is a healthy debate on the related question of preference formation and change. The proposed research will contribute to these theoretical discussions by empirically demonstrating the extent to which a particular set of institutions change an important class of attitudes and related behaviors. Individuals' views about the environment and variations in their willingness to protect and conserve natural resources can have a significant impact on the success of conservation policies and the enforcement costs related to institutions for environmental management. In a global context where numerous developing countries claim they are decentralizing decision making and enforcement institutions related to environmental resources such as forests and water, as well as development domains such as health and education, knowledge about the drivers of individual attitudes and behavior is crucial to the success of decentralization policies. The study will also address policy issues such as how to design and target institutions to produce significant impacts on attitudes and behavior; generate a panel dataset that can be used to test a range of hypotheses about the efficacy of policy interventions, attitude change and the political economy of development and environmental conservation; and produce substantive knowledge about a common and increasingly popular class of local governance institutions. Finally, the research project will strengthen collaborations between scholars and organizations in India and the United States and will contribute to the training of graduate students through their participation in the research project at the University of Michigan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the KLB DAV College for Women, Palampur, India.