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This paper experimentally tests the effectiveness of two short edutainment campaigns (under 25 minutes) delivered through Facebook Messenger at reshaping gender norms and reducing social acceptability of violence against women in India. Participants were randomly assigned to watch video clips with implicit or explicit messaging formats (respectively a humorous fake reality television drama or a docuseries with clear calls to action). After one week, the intent-to-treat effects of the implicit format on knowledge, gender norms, and acceptability of violence against women oscillated between 0.16 and 0.21 standard deviations yet impacts diminished after four months. By contrast, the explicit format was more impactful in the short term in increasing willingness to share video clips with friends and promoting online information-seeking behaviors. In the medium term, individuals who were exposed to the docuseries were 91 percent (7.5 percentage points) more likely to add a frame against violence against women in their Facebook profile picture, a public display of their disapproval of this harmful practice. The general lack of heterogeneous effects across social status indicators suggests social media as a potential medium for reaching different online populations, including vulnerable ones.

Sex crimes.

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This paper provides an explanation for why many information campaigns fail to affect decision-making. The authors experimentally show that a large information intervention about a profitable and climate-friendly household investment had limited effects if it only provided generic data. In contrast, it caused households to make new investments when it followed a campaign strategy designed to minimize information processing costs. This finding is consistent with a model of selective attention, where individuals prioritize information believed to be valuable after accounting for the costs of attending to the data that arise due to limited mental energy and time. The paper studies a range of possible mechanisms and finds corroborative evidence of selective attention as an inhibitor to learning.

Broadcast and Media --- Decision-Makers --- Information and Communication Technologies --- Information Campaign --- Information Technology --- Investment --- Marketing --- Private Sector Development --- Psychology --- Renewable Energy --- Selective Attention --- Selective Attentiveness --- Social Development

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Environmental conditional cash transfers, or "payments for ecosystem services" are a centerpiece of global efforts to protect biodiversity, safeguard watersheds, and mitigate climate change by reducing forest loss. This paper evaluates the impacts of Mexico's national payments for ecosystem services program, which provides five years of payments to landowners in exchange for maintaining and managing natural land cover. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper studies impacts on environmental, socioeconomic, and social capital outcomes for the 2011-14 program cohorts. The analysis finds that treated communities increased management activities to protect land cover, such as patrolling for illegal conversion or combatting soil erosion (by 48 percent compared to controls). The program reduced the loss of tree cover in areas at high risk of deforestation (by 29 percent compared to controls), with effects being larger for those that have been in the program the longest (38 percent compared to controls). These results are similar to estimates of impact for earlier program cohorts and continue to highlight the importance of targeting the program to areas of high risk of land cover loss to increase environmental effectiveness. The program continued to reach poor communities and households, but estimated impacts on household wealth indicators are small in magnitude and not statistically significant. These results indicate that community-level conditional payments did not harm household-level socioeconomic indicators, a key safeguard requirement of conservation policies of the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The data also show that payments for ecosystem services significantly increased community social capital-the institutions, attitudes, and values that govern human interactions-(by 9 percent compared to controls), and these externally provided incentives did not crowd out household contributions to other community work.

Access of poor to social services --- Biodiversity --- Coastal and marine resources --- Deforestation --- Disability --- Economic assistance --- Ecosystem services --- Energy and natural resources --- Environment --- Environmental disasters and degradation --- Environmental protection --- Forest degradation --- Forestry --- Forestry management --- Forests and forestry --- Global environment facility --- Land conservation --- Natural resources management --- Natural resources management and rural issues --- Payments --- Reducing emissions --- Regression discontinuity --- Services and transfers to poor --- Social capital --- Social protections and labor --- Sustainable land and crop management --- Sustainable land management --- Water resources