Abstract
The use of summer pastures in the European Alps provides much evidence against Hardin’s prediction of the tragedy of the commons. For centuries, farmers have kept summer pastures in communal tenure and avoided its overuse with self-designed regulations. During the past decades, however, summer pastures have become less intensely used, which has reduced its agronomic value and the by-production of public goods. However, very little is known about how the various governance incentives affect farmers’ use of summer pasture to result in below-sustainable activity. In this study, we develop an empirically informed game theoretical model of farmers’ land use decisions, which we validate with survey data from a case study in Switzerland. Our results reveal that farmers weigh the benefit of resource use against the costs of maintaining it and that all major sectoral developments, such as increasing livestock endowment, increasing opportunity costs, and decreasing land use intensity on private plots, result in the reduced use of summer pastures. Based on these insights, we suggest adapting the incentive structure at the local and federal governance levels to increase incentives for stocking at the margin. Our study shows how game theory combines with field validation to identify the contextual behavioral drivers in common pool resource dilemmas for informed and improved policy making.
Highlights
Common pool resource (CPR) management problems are generally associated with overuse, resulting in commons tragedies, such as depletion or pollution of the resource [1]
When splitting the sample into leaders and non-leaders, assuming that leaders’ behavior influences non-leaders but not vice versa, we find that, for the leaders, increased provision fines Fc reduce appropriation behavior, but the same does not hold for non-leaders, which may be partly rooted in higher opportunity costs for leaders, as our theoretical model suggests
We investigated the problem of CPR underuse through a case study of mountainous common property pastures in Switzerland
Summary
Common pool resource (CPR) management problems are generally associated with overuse, resulting in commons tragedies, such as depletion or pollution of the resource [1] In this case, mismanagement is characterized by over-appropriation; that is, excessive extraction levels do not allow the resource to regenerate. Less well-known problem associated with CPRs is underuse In this case, appropriation and provision activities both drop to levels which have potentially negative effects on ecosystem services or infrastructure, resulting in a decline of resource availability. Government efforts are made in Japan to prevent the underuse of rural areas and communal semi-natural grasslands in particular [5,6,10] It is highly context-dependent whether CPR underuse is considered problematic, research should address this topic to better understand the dynamics that lead to CPR underuse
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