Preference change and its role in renewable resource use

Resumen

The presence of environmental issues in most political-economic debates has been a major feature of the last third of the 20th Century. For this reason, since the 1970s economic theory has made a great effort to introduce natural resources as one of the essential explicative factors of economic dynamics. However, very little attention has been paid to two elements; the long-terco change in social preferences and the incorporation of non economic factors in the structure of preferences. An analysis of the former is justified by the essentially dynanúc character of the object being studied. The need to incorporate not strictly economic factors as variables to explain the behaviour of agents has been demanded by a growing number of authors. Special importance must be given to works looking into economy and identity (developed around the contribution of Amartya Sen) which set out to analyze the existing links between identity and economic behavior, as well as the findings from the relatively modem field of experimental economics (associated with the thinking of Kahnemann, Tversky & Plott ) which propose considering an individual predisposed towardscooperation. Traditionally, within the optimizing utilitarian framework used for the development of works incorporating the question of natural resources into their analysis, social preferences have been dealt with from two different perspectives. The first one regards final consumption as the only source of satisfaction (Dasgupta and Heal, 1974; Stiglitz, 1974;Solow, 1974; Aghion and Howitt, 1992; Grossman and Helpman, 1991). The second one, taken from a wider viewpoint, considers an intrinsic evaluation of natural resources as anadditional element for personal well-being (Krautkraemer, 1985; Beltratti et al. 1993; 1995; 1998; Heal, 1998; 2001; Lafforgue, 2005; Wirl, 1999; 2004). Despite the theoretical advances of this inclusion of the intrinsic evaluation of natural resources as a source of personal satisfaction, the framework defined by the authors in Chis field is insufficient to analyze how certain non-economic factors; such as the existence of identities which promote cooperative attitudes regarding the environment can bear an influence on the behavior of agents. Hence, it seems essential to design a new axiomatic framework which includes existing relationships between identity, choice and sustainable exploitation of natural resources. We start out by supposing that a social reference standard exists and that this standard promotes an environmentally-friendly behaviour. Furthermore, agents identityy to a greater or lesser degree with this standard depending on the ecological sensitivity of each individual. This reference standard, which we shall call Environmentally Friendly Identity, is linked to what the agents of a specific society understand by concepts such as "environmentally friendly", "environmentally sustainable", etc. Based on this point, we pose the question as to how far the identification of each agent with this standard modifies the levels of use and consumption of natural resources and, in this sense, how this favours the sustainable exploitation of said resources. The findings show that the more the social reference standard stimulates the cooperating propensity of each individual via voluntary reductions in consumption, the more conservative resource exploitation policies become. Likewise, we can characterize societies as being more equitable or less equitable intergenerationally in function of the level of identification presented by the agents making up each society. Incorporating identity questions into the analysis has also allowed us to explore the existing trade off between the production of goods and the conservation of natural resources. Although we have seen that the higher the level of identification shown by agents, the lower the level of production, if the relative evaluation of the resource stock is sufficiently high, the level of social satisfaction can increase even as income falls. These findings enable us to draw interesting conclusions relating to environmental policies in place since the 1970s. The use of environmental polices to limit direct access to certain renewable natural resources was common in the late 70s. For example, the overexploitation of some fishing resources, such as herrings or whales, had led to the stock of diese species dropping to a critical