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27 UCLA J. Envtl. L. & Pol'y 93 (2009)
Law and Norms in Collective Action: Maximizing Social Influence to Minimize Carbon Emissions

handle is hein.journals/uclalp27 and id is 95 raw text is: Law and Norms in Collective Action: Maximizing Social Influence to Minimize Carbon Emissions Jed S. Ela* ABSTRACT Legal scholars have long argued that informal social norms can solve collective action problems, as long as these problems occur in close-knit groups. This group knittedness hypothesis may suggest that social norms, by themselves, will not be able to solve the world's largest collective action problem: anthropogenic cli- mate change. Yet recent scholarship has taken the group knit- tedness hypothesis too far, suggesting that any attempt to manage social influences in large, loose-knit groups is likely to be relatively ineffective. In fact, social norms can shape individual behavior even in loose-knit groups, and climate policies that ignore norms may miss important opportunities to reduce carbon emissions. To predict how social norms might aid specific policy interventions, this Comment proposes looking at the visibility of specific behav- iors rather than the knittedness of groups. According to two leading theories of the origin of social norms, norms govern the behaviors that people use to compete for social status or eco- nomic benefits. Because behaviors must be visible to become ve- hicles for competition, policymakers may be able to leverage norms by tailoring interventions to the visibility of carbon-emit- ting behaviors. For highly visible behaviors, where social influ- ences are likely to be strong, policymakers should focus on creating a normative consensus in favor of changing behavior in order to align social influences with the desired policy. In con- trast, for lower-visibility behaviors, policymakers must first focus on raising visibility, since visibility is necessary for social enforce- ment to begin. Finally, for inherently low-visibility behaviors, * Emil Joseph Stache Public Interest Scholar, J.D. class of 2011, UCLA School of Law.

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