Managing Risk Through Cooperation: Need-Based Transfers and Risk Pooling Among the Societies of the Human Generosity Project

Abstract

Risk is inevitable, and managing it is an important component of individual and community strategies to adapt to local conditions. In this chapter we provide an overview of the risk management frameworks in eight communities to show how each society manages risk socially. We focus especially on the use of need-based transfers to buffer the effects of disasters and ecological uncertainty and provide abundant evidence that need-based transfers are a common strategy for the social management of risk. We use the terms need-based transfers and debt-based transfers rather than other existing terms because no current terms used in the literature capture the underlying logic of need-based transfers. They do not describe the kinds of formal, contractual risk-pooling arrangements found at some of our field sites. The Human Generosity Project, a transdisciplinary effort to examine both biological and cultural influences on human cooperation, has documented and analyzed these and many other examples of social risk management.