Voluntary monitoring of households in waste disposal: An application of the institutional analysis and development framework

Abstract

While increasing consensus has grown around the important role of monitoring in environmental resource governance, little is known about under what conditions people would rather pay private costs to implement monitoring and punishment. Using field survey data on communities and households from four suburb areas in China, this paper employs Institutional Analysis and Development framework to empirically examine households’ willingness and actual activities on waste disposal monitoring. The empirical results show that population density, community modernization, and being male significantly increase the likelihood of households supervising waste disposal while community size and heterogeneity of wealth and ethnicity seriously impede the involvement of households in waste disposal supervision. More importantly, our estimation results reveal that staffing community with full-time cadres for sanitation management suppress the enthusiasm of households in conducting waste disposal supervision, but stock of social capital and peer monitoring substantially increase the intention to supervise waste disposal and the possibility of households engaging in waste disposal supervision activities. In addition, social norms, household income, and householder age are primary predictors of the intention-behavior gap between hypothetical willingness to monitor and actual monitoring behavior. Therefore, improving community infrastructure and economic condition, reducing external intervention on community affairs, and cultivating social capital stock are important approaches to enhance public participation in environmental governance.