Abstract
Evolutionary analyses of the ways humans manage natural resources have until recently focused on the costs and benefits of prudent resource use to the individual. In contrast, the fields of environmental resource management and sustainability focus on institutions whereby successful practices can be established and maintained, and the extent to which these fit specific environmental conditions. Furthermore, recent theoretical work explores how resource conservation practices and institutions can emerge through co-evolutionary processes if there are substantial group-level benefits. Here we examine the design of a prominent yet controversial institutional intervention for reducing deforestation and land degradation in the developing world (REDD+), and its ongoing implementation on Pemba Island (Zanzibar, Tanzania) to determine the extent to which the features of REDD+ might allow for the endogenous adoption of sustainable forest management institutions. Additionally, we consider factors that might impede such outcomes, such as leakage, elite capture, and marginal community participation. By focusing on prospective features of REDD+ design that could facilitate the spread of environmentally sustainable behavior within and between communities, we identify distinct dynamics whereby institutional practices might coevolve with resource conservation practices. These insights should contribute to the design of more effective forest management institution in the future.
Highlights
Conservation is a cooperative social dilemma whereby individuals have to forego short-term benefits for future rewards (Hames 1987; Ruttan and Borgerhoff Mulder 1999; Smith and Wishnie 2000)
We focus on the pending implementation of a Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)? program in the community forests of Zanzibar (Tanzania), focusing on the island of Pemba, and explore its opportunities and constraints within the framework of cultural multilevel selection (cMLS)
Unlike Waring and Acheson’s retrospective assessment of how the institutions of territoriality and harvest management practices might have arisen in the Maine lobster fishery, we focus on prospective features of REDD? design that might facilitate the spread of environmentally sustainable behavior within and between communities across Pemba
Summary
Conservation is a cooperative social dilemma whereby individuals have to forego short-term benefits for future rewards (Hames 1987; Ruttan and Borgerhoff Mulder 1999; Smith and Wishnie 2000). A major challenge lies in understanding how social systems move from sub-optimal environmentally harmful equilibria conferring immediate individual benefits towards Pareto-Superior, socially optimal, but costly cooperative solutions. The processes under which these cooperative institutions evolve and spread are still opaque. This is a problem because as scientists we would like to make statements about how to make solutions attainable. Waring et al (2015, 2017) have proposed a cultural multilevel selection (cMLS) model to understand the development and transmission of cooperative, yet costly institutions for resource
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