Lanza Castillo, Gracia María

Gracia Lanza is a postdoctoral fellow with specialization on environmental and resource economics. She received her PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Göttingen, Germany and her M.Sc. degree on Environmental Sciences from Wageningen University and Research Center, The Netherlands. Her research interests are on behavioral economics, nudging conservation behavior and the formation and strength of social norms.

Her dissertation focused on adoption of pressurized irrigation technologies in Chile specifically understanding the dynamics among cognitive (attitudes, perceived control, intention and social norms), socio and economic variables to understand the link between intention and adoption of pressurized systems. Additionally, she work on disentangling the effect of collective vs individual payment for environmental services schemes, heterogeneous effects and the influence of network characteristics on conservation behavior in the Jambi Province, Indonesia.

She has more than 13 years of working experience, as project manager for USAID/Honduras and as implementer of developing projects. She has work with protected areas, co-managers, small cooperatives living in and around protected areas. She has also work with the private sector to implement cleaner production strategies.  

Her current research looks at how to influence conservation behavior under the collaborative marine program. Specifically, she is involve in the implementation of field experiments in Costa Rica aiming at reducing marine pollution due to single use plastic. She collaborates with the extended team of the collaborative program including India, South Africa, Chile, Vietnam, China, Sweden and Tanzania.  She applies techniques of field experiments, choice behavior analysis and econometric modeling