Environmental policy mixes and target group heterogeneity: analysing Danish farmers’ responses to the pesticide taxes

ABSTRACT

In this article, we challenge two assumptions embedded in many ex-ante analyses of environmental policy instruments. Firstly, it is often assumed that target groups in environmental policy are homogeneous and thus can be expected to respond to policy instruments in a similar manner. Secondly, individual target group members are expected to respond to policy instruments like ‘economic man’, particularly in relation to MBIs applied in environmental policy. We argue that despite the ‘behavioural turn’ in public policy, the debate on policy instrument development and effectiveness has often neglected target group heterogeneity. E.g. members of a given policy target group may be driven by different motivations and each member may even act based on a combination of motivations. Target group heterogeneity suggests that rather than chasing a single perfect policy instrument, research and environmental governance should focus more on better policy mixes to match those differences in decision-making rationales. We argue that a focus on instrument combinations designed to effectively address policy problems where target groups are heterogeneous would mark a new and innovative stage in the research on policy instruments. We substantiate our argument by an empirical analysis of farmer responses to Danish agricultural pesticide taxes.

KEYWORDS:

• Target groups
• motivation
• environmental taxation
• behaviour
• farmer decision-making
• policy instruments

Acknowledgement

We thank the participants of the JEPP@21 Workshop in Berlin September 2019 for very helpful comments on a draft version of the paper. Additionally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for many good comments and suggestions. Finally, yet importantly, we thank farmers and advisors who took the time to participate in those surveys and qualitative interviews referred to.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anders Branth Pedersen is a Senior Researcher (PhD Political Science) at Aarhus University, Department of Environmental Science. ABP’s research is primarily centred on environmental policy analyses and environmental governance. E.g. through analyses of the effectiveness of environmental policies and policy instruments, analyses of implementation barriers and analyses of multi-level environmental governance.

Helle Ørsted Nielsen is a Senior Researcher (PhD Political Science) at Aarhus University, Department of Environmental Science and Department of Political Science. HON’s research focuses on governance, implementation, design of policy instruments and target group behaviour in the fields of energy, climate and environmental policy.

Carsten Daugbjerg is a Professor at the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen and an Honorary Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. His research on environmental policy focuses on agri-environmental policy instruments, organic food policies and biofuels policy.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the financial funding from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s ‘Bekæmpelsesmiddelforskningsprogram’ for the research on pesticide policies referred to in in this article through the grants MST-667-00073 and MST-667-00120; and the Aarhus University ‘AU Tapwater’ project for funding part of the time used on writing this article.