By Joe Arvai

8/10/09

We arrived yesterday in the afternoon at EARTH University after what was
quite a spectacular drive through the Costa Rican highlands.  After some
good food and better company in the evening, it was down to work this
morning.

One of the central aspects of our research involves helping local
communities to address the tradeoffs that alternative environmental policies
entail.  In a nutshell, stricter environmental regulations will, in theory,
do a better job of protecting the environment.  However, they will also cost
more.  So the basic question is, are the added environmental benefits worth
the additional costs?  To answer this question, our plan is to compare –
via a series of experiments — economic and decision-analytic methods aimed
at helping people to confront these tradeoffs.

From left: Robby Richardson, Ramón León and Delanie Kellon discuss the project. (courtesy Joe Arvai)

Because we’re working with communities located around pineapple plantations,
however, protecting the environment while also maintaining livelihoods
associated with production actually gets quite complicated.  Many attributes
of potential environmental policies — e.g., the presence or absence of
buffer zones, restrictions on pesticide use,  alternative soil conservation
techniques, etc. — all need to be considered.  More than that, the
relationships between performance across these attributes and, ultimately,
the cost to implement and monitor new policies needs to be determined.

So we spent today working with our local contact, Dr. Ramón León, to start thinking
about this. Before we can even consider going into a local community to carry out the
methodological aspects of our research, the problem context that will be the focus of
our experiments has to make sense to both experts and local stakeholders. Not an
easy task…but, an absolutely necessary one.