From lab to field to farm: Applying behavioral science insights to agri-environmental programs
Date
2025-03-19
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Journal of Soil and Water Conservation
Abstract
Experimentation in environmental policy is often lacking because of an assumption that scientific research stops when implementation starts. However, researchers and policymakers increasingly recognize that environmental policy would benefit greatly from a more robust culture of experimentation and innovation, as has begun to develop in the areas of health and education policy (Ferraro et al. Citation2023). In the context of achieving agri-environmental policy goals, trialing new management programs is critical to generating measurable improvements that have remained elusive for decades. For example, the recent Comprehensive Evaluation of System Response (CESR) report for the Chesapeake Bay recommends more widespread use of policy implementation trials or “sandboxing” to test and evaluate the efficacy of new program rules and approaches in the face of insufficient progress on achieving Chesapeake Bay goals (Stac Citation2023).
In this article, we apply insights gained from behavioral economic experiments in the lab and field to a policy implementation trial at a multifarm scale. Approaches for forming and incentivizing the policy trial are motivated by behavioral science results, such as those that demonstrate the benefits of pay-for-performance incentive structures (Schilizzi Citation2017), incentives for spatial coordination (Banerjee et al. Citation2021; Kuhfuss et al. Citation2016), information framing in terms of social norms and peer comparisons (Allcott Citation2011; Fleming, Palm-Forster, and Kelley Citation2021; Palm-Forster et al. Citation2022), and the necessity of building trust for stakeholder-engaged resource management (Ostrom Citation2010).
In what follows, we describe resource councils as a form of stakeholder organization conducive to policy implementation trials. Then we illustrate the formation of a particular resource council in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in south-central Pennsylvania tasked with the goal of reducing streambank sediment pollution. We describe how insights from behavioral and experimental economics are applied to create incentives and supply information to allow the council to meet a shared environmental goal. Finally, we present key outcomes from the first year of the council’s work and discuss lessons learned from this approach.
Description
This article was originally published in Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00224561.2025.2459580.
© 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with
their consent.
Keywords
Citation
Fleming, Patrick M., Leah H. Palm-Forster, Hannah Connuck, and Alice E. Fodor. 2025. “From Lab to Field to Farm: Applying Behavioral Science Insights to Agri-Environmental Programs.” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 80 (1): 3–12. doi:10.1080/00224561.2025.2459580.