Abstract
Increasing migration, leading to more heterogeneous societies, may challenge the successful management of common-pool resources (CPRs) directly due to the lack of shared interests, and indirectly by reducing trust amongst local commons users, speeding up depletion of vital natural and man-made resources. Since little research has been done on this topic, we analyse the relation between economic and sociocultural heterogeneity, trust and successful commons management for fisheries and irrigation systems. Using multiple imputations with chained equations, random forests and predictive mean matching, we adopt an innovative and technically advanced approach to employ Elinor Ostrom’s famous CPR Database. Our approach enables us to include economic and sociocultural heterogeneity, trust and control variables in one model and to investigate both direct and indirect effects of heterogeneity on CPR success, which has not been attempted before. Results show no evidence of the negative relation between heterogeneity and CPR success. However, economic heterogeneity is negatively related to trust, and trust is found to be positively related to CPR success. Evidence is found for an indirect effect of economic heterogeneity through trust on CPR success.
Highlights
Societies are becoming more diverse on ethnic, cultural and economic dimensions due to growing migrant populations all over the world, especially in Northern Africa, Western Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (International Migration Report 2019 2019)
In order to understand the indirect relation between heterogeneity and common-pool resources (CPRs) success, we introduce trust as a mediator: there is evidence that trust is influenced by heterogeneity (Alesina and La Ferrara 2002; Delhey and Newton 2005; Ostrom 1990; Putnam 2007) and that it plays an important role in influencing societal outcomes (Fukuyama 1995; Putnam 2000; Uslaner 2002; Zak and Knack 2001)
Sociocultural heterogeneity has a negative relation to trust in the combined sample and the irrigation sample, a significant negative relation to balance in the irrigation sample and a marginally significant negative relation with unit quality in the irrigation sample
Summary
Societies are becoming more diverse on ethnic, cultural and economic dimensions due to growing migrant populations all over the world, especially in Northern Africa, Western Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (International Migration Report 2019 2019). This increasing heterogeneity may pose a challenge to the successful management of common-pool resources (CPRs) in two ways: (1) directly by diversifying interests amongst users and (2) indirectly by reducing trust amongst users. The aim of this paper is to gain insight into whether and how two types of heterogeneity— economic and sociocultural—and their interplay with trust affect the success of a CPR, that is, its sustainable long-term use and quality of the resource
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