Dr Esther Schuch
Former Visiting Fellow
Esther Schuch is a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam, Germany and joined CDRI as visiting research fellow in February 2022. She holds a PhD in Environmental and Behavioral Economics from Wageningen University, Netherlands, and a master’s degree in Political Economy from University of Trier, Germany.
She works on social-ecological systems and socio-technical system in which she studies how humans interact with each other and the ecological or technical system. Of particular interest to her are social norms, behavioural biases, and attitudes with a special focus on countries in the Global South. Her current research ranges from social norms towards electricity theft in Colombia, to attitudes towards renewable energy in Jordan and Malaysia, measuring energy justice, to support for renewable energy and energy literacy in Cambodia. She uses a combination of methods from surveys, economic experiments, and expert interviews. Esther’s areas of interest are energy transition dynamics, natural resource management, and sustainable development.
Email : Esther.Schuch@iass-potsdam.de
Voluntary contributions to public goods are vulnerable to free riding. A potential solution is the implementation of a costly institutional arrangement that deters free riding behavior. In this paper, we analyze to what extent resource users are willing to bear those costs and vote in favor of costly institutions. We carried out lab-in-the-field ex...
This study hypothesizes that the reason for Cambodia’s moving toward a more fossil fuel-based energy could be due to the misperceptions or underestimated co-benefits of renewable energy in relation to the associated costs. If the support for renewable energy depends on the framing, then public support for renewable energy from both policy makers an...