Accounting for Ecological Choices through Individual Commitments in Collective Actions: The Kovenant Model

This paper introduces the Kovenant model, a formal framework for understanding ecological choices as resulting from norm-guided individual commitments that emerge in fragmented collective contexts. Rather than primarily seeking to optimise outcomes or induce cooperation through incentives, the model represents how agents act as if an ecological covenant were in place, thereby reshaping their own decision-making structure. The model captures key behavioural features such as over-investment or crowding-out effects, showing that these are not irrational deviations, but responses to the absence of well-defined shared normative expectations. The Kovenant model offers, thus, theoretical ground for explaining ecological behaviours in emerging social norms