Universität Konstanz Fachbereich Politik- und Verwaltungswissenschaft Dr. Antje Witting - Urban Resilience WS 2017/2018 The implementation of a public shaming- policy to persuade citizens to participate in waste separation in Seattle Hausarbeit, vorgelegt von Katrin Knaak Zogelmannstr. 16, 78462 Konstanz katrin.knaak@uni-konstanz.de 01/ 732332 Fachsemester 3, BA Politik- und Verwaltungswissenschaft
Contents THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A PUBLIC SHAMING- POLICY TO PERSUADE CITIZENS TO PARTICIPATE IN WASTE SEPARATION IN SEATTLE 1 WASTE SEPARATION AS AN ISSUE FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES 1 WASTE MANAGEMENT AS A COMMON-POOL RESOURCE 2 EXCLUDABILITY 2 SUBTRACTABILITY 3 THE PROBLEM 4 APPLICATION OF THE INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK 5 OPERATIONALIZATION OF VARIABLES 7 INDEPENDENT VARIABLE 7 DEPENDENT VARIABLE 7 METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION TO DESCRIBE VARIABLES 7 QUANTITATIVE PHASE 8 QUALITATIVE PHASE 10 LIMITATIONS OF THE RESEARCH DESIGN 11 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 12 1
The implementation of a public shaming- policy to persuade citizens to participate in waste separation in Seattle Waste separation as an issue for local governments in the United States In 2014 the United States produced 2,94 times more waste than in 1960. 52,8 of the municipal solid waste, the waste type that consists of everyday items that are discarded in the public, is transported to one of the 2000 active landfills in the country. This waste consists to 35,9% of food and paper and paperboard (United States Enviromental Protection Agency, 2016), materials that are suitable for composting and do not necessarily need be stored on landfills. But besides the thought of using the space on landfills in an efficient way, there are two other major issues with compostable waste on landfills. One is, that the transportation of waste is costly for cities. The city of New York for example does export the produced municipal solid waste to landfills in Pennsylvania, Ohio or Virginia, as there is no operating landfill near the city (GrowNYC, 2018). The composting of food waste and paper and paperboard could lead to a lower amount of waste that has to be transported to landfills. Therefore, it is in the interest of the city councils to persuade citizens to separate their waste. On the other hand, landfills produce 18% of the methane gas emissions in the US, and especially food waste on landfills is a major factor in this production. (United States Enviromental Protection Agency, 2015). Methane gas contributes to global warming, in fact it is 23 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere, thus landfills are a big contributor to the greenhouse effect (Peters, 2016). Therefore, the issue of separating waste is also an environmental one. Those reasons justify the demand and wish that American citizens separate their waste and especially food waste from regular waste that goes to the landfills. Policy makers of Seattle, Washington seemed to recognize the issue and had a rather unusual approach to bring their citizens to participate in waste separation. On January 1 st, 2015, the city implemented a law that allowed the Director of Seattle Public Utilities the establishment of a program of placing educational notices or tags on garbage containers with significant 1
amount of food waste and compostable paper of private households and commercial facilities (City of Seattle Legislative Information Service, 2014). Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) Solid Waste Director Tim Croll justified this step as follows: Most of our city's businesses and residents are already composting. This requirement is a progression of our collective efforts that help our city become even greener. (Seattle Public Information, 2014). The decision to publicly shame citizens instead of fining them or not putting the topic on the agenda shall be approached systematically in the following paper using the Institutional Analysis Development framework by Elinor Ostrom. Waste Management as a Common-Pool Resource The institutional development analysis framework was designed for the purpose of understanding how rules affect the behavior and outcomes achieved by individuals using common-pool resources (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994, p. 23). From this follows that to justify the use of the IAD framework, it first has to be elucidated why the phenomenon that is looked at revolves around a common-pool resource problem. Ostrom defines a common-pool resource as follows: As we define the term, these resource systems are all common-pool resources (CPRs), where excluding potential appropriators or limiting appropriation rights of existing users is nontrivial (but not necessarily impossible) and the yield of the resource system is subtractable (Ostrom, Gardner, & Walker, 1994, p. 4). Summarized, common-pool resources have two characteristics: 1. Non-excludability of potential users 2. Subtractability Henceforth I am going to reason why the resource that is looked at fulfills those conditions: Excludability Ostrom states When the benefits of a good are available to a group, whether or not members of the group contribute to the provision of the good, that good is characterized by problems of excludability (Ostrom E., 2005, p. 24) The benefit that is observed in this case, is the provision of the public service of the city to handle the waste citizens produce, whether or not they separate waste or not. Although individual households have to pay for this service, it is a mandatory duty of citizens to utilize 2
this service. The contribution those households can make is to separate waste in order to reduce the amount of waste that has to be transported to landfills. But as it is not mandatory to separate waste, the city will provide the service of transporting this waste to landfills whether or not one contributes in separating waste and thus reduces the financial and environmental costs for the community. In the interest of the community the city council will likely not exclude citizens from the service whether or not they participate or not, as this exclusion could lead to a dirtier city and thus would also affect the day-to-day experience for other citizens and visitors. An example for the repercussions of the absence of a garbage disposal service would be the strike of waste collectors in the winter of discontent in London 1979. A newspaper reported the appearance of rats on Leicester Square, where the rubbish was temporarily piled only a few weeks after the workers went on strike (Omics International, 2014). Thus, the absence of a garbage disposal service could not only contribute to a dirtier city but also to the spread of diseases by rats and other omnivorous animals. Subtractability Ostrom defines subtractability as follows: When the use of a flow of services by one individual subtracts from what is available to others and when the flow is scarce relative to demand, users will be tempted to try to obtain as much as they can of the flow for fear that it will not be available later. She further remarks: Sometimes, however, it is not feasible to price services. In these instances, some individuals will be able to grab considerably more of the subtractive service than others, thereby leading to non-economic uses of the flow and high levels of conflict among users (Ostrom E., p. 25). As was mentioned before, it is rather unlikely as it would be extremely costly, that a city or community decides to let citizens pay individually for their waste each time the city provides the service of collecting and transporting this waste. Furthermore, it would be a rather big administration effort to ascertain the amount and type of waste, whether or not the household separated the waste and the cost of the service for every household. Hence the system is kept rather simple in most communities and in the provided case. A citizen is obliged to use the service and pays for the rough amount of waste he or she produces. Until the introduction of the policy it did not matter whether or not the person separated waste or not. This means that different households payed the same amount of money for the service, although some produced more landfill waste by not separating their 3
food waste and their paper and paperboard waste from it. There were no additional costs for the amount of waste they did not provide for composting. Thus, the good is not subtractable itself, but the costs for it are and if every household would exhaust the service by not separating waste at all this would lead to higher costs for the civic community. In contrast, a community consisting of more considerate citizens that followed the general guide lines for waste separation conscientiously could reduce the costs the whole community would have to bear. These shared costs are an incentive to free-ride, to not make an effort about waste separation because the whole community shares the costs and thus a household will not be affected if it produces waste way over the average or does not separate the produced amount. The Problem As was observed that the discussed phenomenon revolves around a common-pool resource that gives citizens the incentive to free-ride, one can further distinguish between two major types of common-pool-resource problems. There can either appear a problem in the process of providing the resource, or the possibility to use the resource without control leads to an appropriation problem. As this paper addresses the uncontrolled usage of a service, the phenomenon can be further categorized as an appropriation problem. Or as Ostrom et al. define: ( ) increased appropriation by a user reduces the average return others receive from their costly investments in appropriation (Ostrom, Gardner & Walker, 1994, p. 10). Considering this definition, it can be applied to the case as follows: The appropriation that is looked at in this case is the not-participating in waste separation. With an increasing non-participation, the average return of others reduces as the financial means are not used to their advantage and instead they have to bear the costs for appropriators. Having determined that the studied phenomenon revolves around a Common-Pool Resource, it is possible to apply the Institutional Analysis Development Framework in order to create a research design. The framework can be seen as a guideline in order to design a diagnostic single case study, in which the case is examined starting from the outcome. 4
Application of the Institutional Analysis Development framework Ostrom et al. 2014, p. 271 The Institutional Analysis Development Framework is concerned with an action arena in which two holons participants and an action situation interact as they are affected by exogenous variables ( ) and produce outcomes that in turn affect the participants and the action situation (Ostrom E., 2005, p. 13) Applied to the case, the produced outcome is the implementation of the policy and the participants in the decision to implement the policy are the members of the Seattle City Council. Following the framework, the Seattle City Council interacted with an action situation and produced the policy as an outcome that then again affected them. For a more specific concept one has to further zoom in into the action arena: Ostrom (2005), p.33 5
The framework breaks down the action situation in clusters of variables. As the goal of the constructed research design is to explain the phenomenon of the implementation of such an unusual policy and as the implementation has been defined as the outcome before, the paper focuses on the aspect that is directly influencing the outcome, the net costs and benefits. Ostrom defines the net costs and benefits as ( ) external incentives and deterrents in a situation (Ostrom E., 2005, p. 32). As the outcome is known, the net costs and benefits can be defined as the incentives and deterrents that influenced the actors, the Seattle city council, to implement the policy. Zooming in one more layer in the framework, Ostrom continues explaining the dependence of the costs and benefits: Payoff rules affect the benefits and costs assigned to outcomes given the actions chosen (Ostrom E., 2005, p. 190) In the framework payoff rules are defined as [rules that] assign external rewards or sanctions to particular actions that have been taken or to particular readings on outcome state variables (Ostrom E., p. 207). She further explains, that payoff rules are one way to reduce ( ) the appropriations made from a common pool resource ( ) as to add a penalty to actions that are prohibited (Ostrom E., 2005, p.43). The payoff rule that can be identified in the studied case is the policy itself. Ostrom classifies three types of payoff rules that are used extensively in the field, (1) the imposition of a fine, (2), the loss of appropriation rights, and (3) incarceration (Ostrom E., 2005, p.233) The rule that is looked at in this paper does not belong to any of those categories. This singularity of this rule inevitably leads to one wondering why the actors decided for the implementation, as they could also have decided for the imposition of a fine as a classic and at first glance financially efficient payoff-rule. The purpose of this research would be to help answering this question. In order to define the rule in accord with the used framework, the horizontal approach is applied, which classifies rules by their aim (Ostrom E., 2005, p. 187). For this purpose, the following general syntax was designed: ATTRIBUTES of participants who are OBLIGED, FORBIDDEN, OR PERMITTED to ACT (or AFFECT an outcome) under specified CONDITIONS, OR ELSE Applied to the discussed rule: Citizens of Seattle are obliged to separate their waste or else they get publicly shamed as their trash gets marked with a red citation tag. 6
Summarized, the application of the case to the framework leads to the following hypothesis: Payoff rules affected the deterrents and incentives that lead to decision to implement the policy by the Seattle City Council. Or formulated as a research question: Can the payoff rule explain the costs and benefits that the Seattle City Council assigned to waste separation? Operationalization of Variables Independent Variable Payoff rules affect the benefits and costs that will be assigned to particular combinations of actions and outcomes, and they establish the incentives and deterrents for action (Ostrom & Ostrom, 2014, p. 278). The payoff rule in this case is supposed to establish an incentive to separate waste or vice versa a deterrent for not separating waste. But it also affects benefits and costs that were assigned to the implementation of the policy. Dependent Variable Payoff rules directly impact the net costs and benefits of action or outcomes for actors in an action situation. The net costs and benefits of this action are the costs and benefits that are related to the implementation and enforcement of the introduced policy. In the decision-making process the responsible actors must have come to the conclusion that the benefits of this policy overweight the costs. It is the purpose of the established research design to understand what those costs and benefits were. To operationalize net costs and benefits, the perception of the responsible actors, the Seattle City Council, of several possible benefits and possible costs of the policy shall be measured. Methods of Data collection to describe variables As the decision-making process is a very complex issue that can hardly be explored with just a quantitative research, the decision was made to approach the subject with a mixedmethod design, which can be described as a procedure for collecting, analyzing, and 7
mixing or integrating both quantitative and qualitative data ( ) for the purpose of better understanding of the research problem (Ivankova, Creswell, & Stick, 2006, p. 3). It is argued for a combined use of qualitative and quantitative methods in order to complement each other and allow for a more robust analysis, taking advantage of strengths of each (Ivankova, Creswell, & Stick, 2006, p. 7). In order to first provide a general understanding of the subject of interest and afterwards concentrating on the explanation and in-depth understanding of the found results, it is planned to first conduct the quantitative and then the qualitative part. This approach is also known as mixed-methods sequential explanatory design. Quantitative Phase As our interest is, if and which net costs and benefits did influence the decision to implement the policy, it stands reason to first conduct a survey in written form with the responsible politicians. More precisely those responsible politicians are the City Council of Seattle of September 2014, which voted unanimously for the policy proposal. The goal for the quantitative phase would be to get an idea of if, and which net costs and benefits were even considered by the responsible actors in the decision-making process. For this purpose, the actors shall be asked to fill out a questionnaire, that consists of different items, which measure the perception of the actors concerning possible net costs and benefits of the policy. The questionnaire shall also provide details on how well those polled remember the policy and the policy-making process, in order to have an idea about how valid their assertions are. Preliminary Version of the Questionnaire: 1. I can recall the legislation-making process that lead to the implementation of a program of placing educational notices or tags on garbage containers with significant amount of food waste and compostable paper of private households and commercial facilities in 2014. 1: I cannot recall the process. 7: I can recall the process to great extent. 8
2. Were you in favor of the implementation of the addressed legislation? Yes No Neutral I do not remember/ I do not want to answer this question 3. To which extent was the decision-making process that lead to the implementation of the program influenced by 1: No influence at all 7: Main issue that influenced the decision a. Economic issues that reasoned the idea b. Wish by participating actors to satisfy citizens c. Wish by participating actors to satisfy certain interest groups d. Wish by participating actors to satisfy certain political actors e. Wish to fulfill campaign pledge f. Wish by participating actors to satisfy voting population g. Wish by participating actors to fulfill written down goals or agreements h. City marketing 9
i. Expert knowledge in the field of policy-making concerning the environment j. Lack of alternative policy ideas k. No alternative policy ideas discussed l. Environmental protection m. Wish to act in line with the party ideology n. Other reasons (please specify those reasons) 4. To which extent was your personal decision to vote for (or against) the addressed legislation influenced by The points above would be repeated here. After the evaluation of the questionnaire, the possible costs or benefits that were sampled could be ranked after their scale value, the mean those items scored. Items with a relatively high scale value could be further elaborated in the qualitative phase. Qualitative Phase In the qualitative phase of the research it is of interest to gain greater understanding of the outcomes of the quantitative phase. Items with a high scale value shall be further discussed in an interview. The qualitative character of it can meet challenges like openness regarding questions, answers and methods, or subject-relatedness. 10
Possible topics for this interview could be, how important the influential issues are to the city and to the interviewed actor, and how their importance affects the city and/ or the actor and it could be further analyzed why the city decided against alternatives like a fine. Questions in this interview could for example be: In which context did [a specific issue] influence the decision-making process? What were the direct benefits that emerged out of the policy-implementation concerning [a specific issue]? How did in your opinion, other alternatives, like the implementation of a fine, not provide those benefits? Which and what kind of costs were avoided by the implementation? The goal of this two-step-analysis is to explain the dependent variable: Payoff rules directly impact the net costs and benefits of action or outcomes for actors in an action situation. Or more precisely, the purpose of the quantitative phase is to find out which costs and benefits were impacted by the payoff rule. Afterwards the qualitative phase shall provide further details on how exactly this impact can be understood, and how those certain costs and benefits established incentives and deterrents for the action of implementing the policy. Limitations of the research design Obviously, the research design revolves around a specific case, so results cannot be generalized nor applied to similar cases. But also, the validity of the provided results is not certain, as reactive interviews entail many different possible error sources, as for example social desirability or the influence of the interviewer (Diekmann, 2007, p. 544). This risk is further enhanced due to the fact that the sample only consists of a small number of people, who might still be political actors and thus might have an interest in saying nothing to the disfavor of them. Furthermore, the execution of the research in two steps is comparatively costly, especially because the evaluation of a problem-centered, relatively open and unstructured interview form is a time-consuming task. 11
Recommendations for future research The decision to directly and publicly take action against citizens who do not follow the rules by exposing their misbehavior is one that has to be further researched, as one would think that it is contrary to classic vote-seeking approaches, because the responsible actor might risk unpopularity. Besides, this kind of policy cannot be found in Elinor Ostrom s classification of payoff rules, which further proves its inscrutable character. (Ostrom E., 2005, p.233). Because of this reasoning it is of great interest to further have a look at different cases in which a policy got implemented that leads to the public shaming of members of the society. To understand this policy decision, it would also be helpful to further research and discuss the repercussions of the implementation of those policies. Do they lead to a desired outcome? How do they change the behavior of community members? The field of policies that implement public-shaming is diverse and of great interest in many different ways. Out of a socio-psychological perspective it could be further observed how community members perceive a public-shaming policy, for example if they actually feel ashamed or guilty. 12
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