Abstract
This paper seeks to build a bridge between how climate interventions, especially adaptation interventions, are conceived and implemented, and the nascent field of behavioural science as a practical, low-cost but potentially rewarding route for increasing the last mile effectiveness of climate interventions. It has two parts: the first part offers a theoretical background and highlights why and how behavioural science can be used in climate interventions. This first part describes behavioural biases and heuristics, summarises how behavioural science generates data including through the use of lab experiments, introduces decision theory, including risk elicitation as a particularly promising approach to closing the intention-action gap. It describes both descriptive and prescriptive processes within decision theory. The second part illustrates how such approaches can be applied using a range of case studies. It offers a fine-grained assessment of how behavioural insights can be integrated more fully in four existing GCF projects. It subsequently offers examples, one on climate insurance in Malawi and Zambia and one on climate resilient agriculture interventions in Nigeria, to highlight how project interventions need to be carefully tailored to the social context in which they are embedded. Simple guidance tools to conduct early, formative investigations into the dispositional, social and cognitive factors that underpin decision-making may be used to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of climate interventions.
Citation
De Roy, E., Jang, C., Krüger, C., Lugger, M., Moussas, F., Muthike, W., Ojha A., Peterson N., Prowse M., Yagnaraman D., & Puri, J. (2021). Behavioural science, decision making and climate investments.