UC Santa Barbara

In resourced-constrained countries like India, ambitions for environmental protection are often limited by the paucity of funds, and limited capacity within governments to implement transformational programs. But an excessive focus on funding and government action fails to account for several ways in which motivated individuals and communities voluntarily come together to solve environmental problems. Such initiatives might be small and dispersed but can be scaled-up by understanding the underlying structure of incentives and motivations that drive people towards contributing labour and finding collective solutions. My dissertation is motivated by the desire to develop practical insights for fostering greater citizen participation and collective action. In particular, my research is focused on understanding how low-cost and non-monetary incentives motivate individuals towards pro-social and pro-environmental behaviours.

The first project examines the factors that contribute to better performance on tasks that managers cannot easily observe. Here, I study frontline employees of an NGO in India who are responsible for improving social development outcomes for rural women. These employees perform two broad categories of tasks – some are observable by their managers and others are more difficult to observe or unobservable. Unobservable tasks like cajoling, convincing, dispute resolution, and emotional labour are critical for frontline work and meeting the NGO’s organizational mission. However they remain unrewarded because they are not observed. Why do frontline employees perform these tasks then? Through a survey of 15,000 rural women and 150 frontline employees, I find that pro-social motivation is associated with improved performance on all types of tasks. On the other hand, I find that monitoring is not associated with improved performance. I also find that understanding the broad principles for action are more important than knowing which specific tasks the management wants employees to execute. The results suggest that managers can improve performance at the frontlines by selecting motivated workers, and by allowing them autonomy to carry out their tasks by reducing the extent of monitoring and supervision.

The second project explores incentives for performance improvement in a national ranking program for cities in India. The Swachh Survekshan is an initiative by the Indian national government for ranking cities on their performance on waste management and sanitation outcomes. Since 2016, the program has scored and ranked cities to motivate performance by inducing the spirit of competition. However, the national government has also frequently changed the metrics by which cities are scored. Utilising this natural experiment, I ask two questions: a) what motivates national governments to engage in target-shifting?, and b) how to cities respond to target-shifting? I develop an original dataset of performance scores and ranks for over 400 cities, supplemented by data on revenue generated by 243 cities and qualitative insights from interviews with government officials and consultants. I find that target-shifting occurs to inflate scores and enhance the reputation of the program, as compared to an alternative scenario in which target-shifting occurs as a result of policy-learning. I also find that cities distort their data in response to target-shifting. However, these distortions are caused less by a conscious effort to “game” the rankings but result from the lack of data management capacity. The results suggest that ranking programs in the public sector are highly prone to distortions by both national and sub-national governments. Instead of selecting winner and losers, alternative strategies for performance improvement that focus on self-assessment and capacity building might be more feasible for the public sector.

The third project examines how just and democratic India’s solar energy policies are. Most commonly, decisions and policies for solar energy development are justified on the basis on mitigating climate change or cost-benefit analyses. Elements such as justice and democracy are relatively new considerations in the policy discourse. I presents a framework for analysis of these concepts grounded in the context of the Global South. With respect to this, I define the articulation of distributional and procedural goals in policy as two pillars of a just and democratic energy transition. Through an analysis of over 30 renewable energy policies, I find that in terms of distributional goals, most policies continue to exclude significant marginalized groups. Where groups are included, the focus is more on identifying them rather than recognizing their specific needs or the processes by which they can effectively transition to becoming full consumers of electricity. Further, distributional goals seeking to create equity beyond access are not substantiated by an allocation of policy-tools to foster the cross-sectoral collaboration required for their implementation. With respect to procedural goals, instruments that facilitate ownership and ease transactions were emphasized and elaborated on more than those that decentre legacy institutions or enhance just participation. Overall, the policies tend to keep the system in its current configuration and forego the opportunity solar provides to create transformative change beyond reducing emissions.