Abstract
Extreme environmental variations, as a phenomenon deriving from climate change, led to an exacerbated uncertainty on water availability and increased the likelihood of conflicts regarding water-dependent activities such as agriculture. In this paper, we investigate the role of conflict resolution mechanisms—one of Ostrom’s acclaimed Design Principles—when social-ecological systems are exposed to physical external disturbances. The theoretical propositions predict that social-ecological systems with conflict-resolution mechanisms will perform better than those without them. We tested this proposition through a framed field experiment that mimicked an irrigation system. This asymmetric setting exposed farmers to two (2) dilemmas: (i) how much to invest in the communal irrigation system’s maintenance and (ii) how much water to extract. The setting added a layer of complexity: water availability depended not only on the investment but also on the environmental variability. Our findings confirmed the theoretical proposition: groups with stronger ‘institutional robustness’ can cope with environmental variations better than those with weaker robustness. However, we also found that some groups, despite lacking conflict-resolution mechanisms, were also able to address environmental variations. We explored potential explanatory variables to these unexpected results. We found that subjects’ and groups’ attributes might address uncertainty and avert conflict. Thus, social-ecological systems’ capacity to respond to external disturbances, such as environmental variations, might not only be a question of Design Principles. Instead, it might also be strongly related to group members’ attributes and group dynamics. Our results pave the way for further research, hinting that some groups might be better equipped for mitigation measures, while others might be better equipped for adaptation measures.
Highlights
Climate change makes extreme weather phenomena the ‘new normal’
We empirically explored the theoretical propositions through our case study with a multi-method approach encompassing a framed-field experiment, a survey conducted with all the subjects participating in the sessions to assess relevant qualitative characteristics that may not be sufficiently captured by the framed-field experiment, and semi structured interviews with key informants
We present the results obtained in our fieldwork and triangulate the multimethod approach to test our guiding hypothesis: the higher the ‘institutional robustness’, and in particular, the conflict resolution mechanism (DP6), the better the performance under environmental variability
Summary
Climate change makes extreme weather phenomena the ‘new normal’. It introduces several layers of uncertainties affecting the way humans relate to nature. The seminal paper of this special issue: “Revisiting the Role of Institutions in Transformative Contexts: Institutional Change and Conflicts” [1], brings to the discussion this unprecedented setting for humanity and the potential surge of conflicts with a focus on the role of institutional change. This paper dives into the latter cause for institutional change, where climate change introduces the external disturbances. We investigate the link between common-pool resources (CPR) and conflicts when the social-ecological system (SES) framing the CPR is affected by an external disturbance
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