Sociocultural heterogeneity in a common pool resource dilemma.

Stefan Gehrig,Achim Schlüter,Peter Hammerstein,Chris T Bauch

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0210561

Abstract

Collective action of resource users is essential for sustainability. Yet, often user groups are socioculturally heterogeneous, which requires cooperation to be established across salient group boundaries. We explore the effect of this type of heterogeneity on resource extraction in lab-in-the-field Common Pool Resource (CPR) experiments in Zanzibar, Tanzania. We create heterogeneous groups by mixing fishers from two neighbouring fishing villages which have distinct social identities, a history of conflict and diverging resource use practices and institutions. Additionally, we analyse between-village differences in extraction behaviour in the heterogeneous setting to assess if out-group cooperation in a CPR dilemma is associated with a community’s institutional scope in the economic realm (e.g., degree of market integration). We find no aggregate effect of heterogeneity on extraction. However, this is because fishers from the two villages behave differently in the heterogeneity treatment. We find support for the hypothesis that cooperation under sociocultural heterogeneity is higher for fishers from the village with larger institutional scope. In line with this explanation, cooperation under heterogeneity also correlates with a survey measure of individual fishers’ radius of trust. We discuss implications for resource governance and collective action research.

Highlights

Collective natural resource use and environmental conservation are typically plagued by social dilemmas [1,2,3]
Model 1 shows that, overall, there is no significant effect of sociocultural heterogeneity on Common Pool Resource (CPR) extraction (p = 0.67)
In Model 2, when the interaction term of sociocultural heterogeneity and village is added to the model to test hypothesis (2), it becomes apparent that, while MA fishers’ extraction in socioculturally heterogeneous groups is increased, CH fishers’ extraction is decreased and, strikingly, even lower than in homogeneous groups (Figs 1B and 2)

Summary

Introduction

Collective natural resource use and environmental conservation are typically plagued by social dilemmas [1,2,3]. We employ an experimental economics approach to investigate how sociocultural heterogeneity affects cooperativeness in a common pool resource (CPR) dilemma (research question 1). This excludes other pathways through which heterogeneity may positively (e.g., diversity of knowledge and assets) or negatively (e.g., differing perceptions about resource use) affect sustainable outcomes [17]. For this aim, we conduct lab-in-the-field CPR experiments in Zanzibar involving fishers from two neighbouring villages that have distinct social identities, a history of conflict and diverging resource use practices and institutions. Lab-in-the-field CPR experiments are a well-established method to assess the role of contextual variables on real resource users’ collective action [8,18,19,20,21]

Methods

Results

Conclusion