ABSTRACT
How can we explain voluntary participation in environmental organizations? From an economics point of view, this activity incurs a private cost to secure a public benefit, presenting something of a puzzle for standard theory (as discussed in the previous chapter). Yet the reality is that people do cooperate to provide a public good,1 a fact that has been covered by literature and experiments in several fields, including social psychology, demography, economics, and economic psychology. Recent literature addressing the “puzzle” of voluntary compliance has highlighted the quality of social capital and institutions as explanatory factors for differences across a range of areas, at both the macro (country) level and at the micro (individual) level. Social capital and institutions were once regarded as “complications” in both theoretical and empirical models, and now are included in studies on such areas as tax compliance, voting behavior and general volunteering activities. We are interested in the links between social capital, institutions, and voluntary care for the environment, and we attempt to gain a better understanding of how environmental participation is embedded in these complex notions.
