Collective Action Outcomes Research Articles

The effectiveness of voluntary collective action in China's rural land development

China is gradually and directly making rural collective land available on the land market. It is important to understand how stakeholders collectively treat and manage this land, and if this collective action leads to effective and sustainable results. This paper, however, revises Ostrom's framework of collective action by constructing the joint analysis of social capital, trust, and cooperation performance, in order to better capture the distinction between voluntary action and enforced action of stakeholders towards a sustainable goal. We analyze the role of voluntary collective action through higher-order structural equation modeling (HSEM), applied to a database consisting of 324 households in Jiangsu Province, China, collected in 2022 and 2023. The results suggest that social capital effectively promotes villagers' trust in policy implementers by establishing new institutions, increasing actors' trustworthiness, and improving channels of information exchange, and the first two means are more effective than the latter. We also demonstrate the significant positive effect of trust on cooperation performance, with trusting relationships with familiar groups and the credible behavior of policy implementers affecting performance outcomes of collective action. Moreover, social capital drives cooperation performance through the mediating effect of mutual trust that it breeds. With this revised framework and verified hypotheses one can thus create more effective policies to avoid inequality and informality in the land marketization process in China.

When social movements fail or succeed: social psychological consequences of a collective action's outcome.

Collective actions occur all around the world and, in the last few years, even more frequently. Previous literature has mainly focused on the antecedents of collective actions, but less attention has been given to the consequences of participating in collective action. Moreover, it is still an open question how the consequences of collective action might differ, depending on whether the actions are perceived to succeed or fail. In two studies we seek to address this gap using innovative experimental studies. In Study 1 (N = 368) we manipulated the perceptions of success and failure of a collective action in the context of a real social movement, the Chilean student movement from last decade. In Study 2 (N = 169), in addition to manipulating the outcome, we manipulated actual participation, using a mock environmental organization aiming to create awareness in authorities, to test the causal effect of both participation and success/failure on empowerment, group efficacy, and intentions of future involvement in normative and non-normative collective actions. Results show that current and past participation predict overall participation in the future, however, in Study 2 the manipulated participation was associated with having less intentions of participating in the future. In both studies, perception of success increases group efficacy. In Study 1, we found that when facing failure, participants increase their willingness to participate more in the future as opposed to non-participants that actually decrease theirs. In Study 2, however, failure increases the perception of efficacy for those with a history of non-normative participation. Altogether these results highlight the moderating role of the outcome of collective action to understand the effect of participation on future participation. We discuss these results in light of the methodological innovation and the real world setting in which our studies were conducted.

The Transformative Potential of Service-Learning in an African Religious Context

Critical reflection is essential for achieving desired service-learning outcomes, including “transformative learning,” as developed by Mezirow (2000). However, critiques of Mezirow’s theory, particularly its focus on the individual learner and prizing of autonomy, raise questions about the relevance of a transformative learning framework for service-learning in diverse global contexts. This article describes a case study of an online service-learning program that resulted in transformative learning for students in East Africa. We offer a method of practical theological reflection that promotes individual and communal reflective praxis. This method contributed to students’ transformative learning outcomes as realized in collective action for sustainable development. Rooted in Christian religious education scholarship, the method is adaptable to service-learning curricula informed by other or non-religious traditions and in non-Western communities. We invite educators to adapt this method to other sociocultural contexts and encourage further research to track longitudinal outcomes of collective action inspired by service-learning.

Multi-level gains of fat activism and their impact on sustained activism for fat justice

Previous research has indicated that outcomes of collective action can occur at the individual, group, and societal levels. Taken together, we argue that multi-level outcomes can influence sustained involvement in social movements. We aimed to examine the multi-level outcomes of fat activism across two studies. In our first study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with fat activists (N = 20) to learn what they believe are the multi-level outcomes of fat activism. At the individual level, activists reported greater health, well-being, and self-esteem; at the group level, they reported a sense of community and increased clothing options; and at the societal level, they reported change in toxic cultures around dieting. By building on the findings of Study 1, Study 2 (N = 464) aimed to understand how fat individuals’ past collective action participation may predict their future collective action participation through individual-, group-, and societal-level gains. Results indicate that greater collective action participation in the past predicts greater willingness to engage in collective action through the pathway of higher beliefs in individual and societal gains of fat activism, but not through group-level gains, even after we control for identification with fat and fat activist identities. We discuss these findings in relation to the importance of multi-level outcomes in collective action and sustained involvement in social movements.

Prosociality predicts individual behavior and collective outcomes in the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic induces a social dilemma: engaging in preventive health behaviors is costly for individuals but generates benefits that also accrue to society at large. The extent to which individuals internalize the social impact of their actions may depend on their prosociality, i.e. the willingness to behave in a way that mostly benefits other people. We conduct a nationally representative online survey in Germany (n = 5843) to investigate the role of prosociality in reducing the spread of COVID-19 during the second coronavirus wave. At the individual level, higher prosociality is strongly positively related to compliance with public health behaviors such as mask wearing and social distancing. A one standard deviation (SD) increase in prosociality is associated with a 0.3 SD increase in compliance (p < 0.01). At the regional (NUTS-2) level, a one SD higher average prosociality is associated with an 11% lower weekly incidence rate (p < 0.01), and a 2%p lower weekly growth rate (p < 0.01) of COVID-19 cases, controlling for a host of demographic and socio-economic factors. This association is driven by higher compliance with public health behaviors in regions with higher prosociality. Our correlational results thus support the common notion that voluntary behavioral change plays a vital role in fighting the pandemic and, more generally, that social preferences may determine collective action outcomes of a society.

The challenges of collective PES: Insights from three community-based models in Vietnam

Vietnam has adopted a national Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PES) policy, which while primarily paying individual households for forest protection, has been flexible enough to allow for collective PES models to also arise. Such collective models have the potential to reduce transaction costs, avoid motivation crowding, and protect common-pool resources like community forests. This paper analyzes three different types of collective PES models that have been tried in Vietnam: community land titles and PES payments to whole villages; group titles and PES payments to collections of households; and collective patrolling with payment contracts but without land tenure rights. We draw on fieldwork across three provinces to examine how these different forms of collective PES have arisen, and how they have articulated with existing forest governance institutions and local social characteristics. We also assess what the advantages and disadvantages for each model are. Overall, we argue that none of Vietnam's collective PES models have achieved unqualified success in generating positive collective action outcomes, and each has challenges that have undermined group efforts, exacerbated underlying problems, or even created new conflicts. Based on our assessment, achieving a mix of individual (primarily financial) benefits together with collective rights and benefits is important for both social cohesion and forest protection. As a result, improving existing local institutional capacities and reinforcing group cohesion to achieve collective action success remain needed within Vietnam’s collective PES models.

A systematic review of the outcomes of sustained environmental collective action

Collective action plays a critical role in progressing efforts to protect the global environment. In this study we examined existing research that specified causal claims about the outcomes of sustained environmental collective action and analysed the collective action characteristics associated with the stated outcomes. Of the 640 studies identified in our literature search, 113 papers examined environmental collective action outcomes over a time period of one or more years. In total, 59 different environmental collective action outcomes were identified, including changing corporate/business practices (n = 16), achieving political outcomes (n = 12), fostering movement building (n = 8), development project-specific outcomes (n = 8), physical changes such as increased forest cover (n = 7), or changes in public opinion, values, or behaviours (n = 4). In terms of general outcomes (i.e., success of failure of environmental collective action) the most common outcome claimed was both success and failure (n = 44), followed by complete success (n = 37) and mostly failure (n = 18). All papers identified the use of normative collective action, while 36 papers mentioned non-violent non-normative action such as blockades and sit-ins. Across the dataset there was a lack of consistency in descriptive terminology, methodological approach and inclusion of empirical evidence in justifying causal claims. We close with recommendations for scholars’ best practices for advancing research into environmental collective action outcomes, namely: consistent terminology, mapping outcomes against goals, increased studies of failure, and diversifying studies in non-WEIRD contexts.

Autonomy as a politico‐economic concept: Peasant practices and nested markets

AbstractThis paper discusses autonomy as a set of practices that result in the production and reproduction of resources that allow for self‐organization. We define autonomy as a social construct that refers to the self‐organizing capacity of people, communities, and movements. Such capacity assumes both resources and agency. In that vein, our conceptualisation implies that autonomy is a relational concept: It can only emerge when and where struggles that aim at going beyond dependency (i.e., nonautonomy) concretely exist. Autonomy is three‐pronged, involving a set of goal‐oriented activities, a distantiation from capital, and the agency of social actors. Intertwined with these levels are peasant movements that have the capacity to develop and implement a political agenda that is not overshadowed and/or dictated by external influences. The paper illustrates this intertwining with the case of the Circuito (O Circuito), a Brazilian peasant movement that has constructed and operates an extended farmers' market and which simultaneously transforms farming practices. The Circuit is the outcome of collective action and shows the potential of multilevel performance of several actors engaged in concerted actions. In the conclusion, we suggest that the Circuit represents autonomy based on commonly pooled resources as well representing a countermovement to the destructive dynamics of food empires.

COVID-19 Research and Policy Analysis: Contributions from Environmental Economists

We discuss contributions by environmental and natural resource (ENR) economists to research and policy analysis of COVID-19. ENR economists have a perspective and tool kit that are particularly well suited to this task. The field of environmental economics began as an interdisciplinary endeavor and has since built on its early legacy to assemble a large set of conceptual models and empirical methods that integrate the relevant natural science, market and nonmarket institutions, and human behaviors to inform policies and shape collective action outcomes. We present elements of policy analysis that together form an integrated framework for studying the pandemic and options for controlling it. We highlight particular tools and skills that provide ENR economists with some comparative advantages for researching and analyzing COVID-19 polices, take stock of what ENR economics research has already achieved, and identify important unresolved issues that ENR economists appear to be especially well qualified to address.

Knowledge Action Repertoires and the Outcomes of Collective Action: Local Community Action for Environmental Protection

The article uses the knowledge practice repertoire approach, combined with an integrated opportunity approach, to investigate the role that local community knowledge based on holistic worldviews plays in the formation of collective actors, action and outcomes. This is argued to be crucial given that environmental governance is shaped instead by knowledge based on a worldview of a nature/culture divide, and that local community knowledge is key to responding to the planetary crisis and subject to this potential ontological clash. Attention to local community collective action using this lens can shed light on whether and how spaces can be made for different approaches, giving a fresh view to how outcomes matter. The article presents two case studies of local community collective action through community protocols from South Africa and Argentina. Community protocols are documents, recognised in international environmental law, where local communities set out their worldviews, their traditional knowledge and practices in support of environmental protection, and link these to rights and protections in national and international law as a basis for collective action. They are thus ideal sites for investigating knowledge practices and ontological politics. Focusing on different types of knowledge practices and opportunity contexts helped to untangle the complex question of how outcomes mattered to the local communities in these cases.

Collective Action Outcomes: Ways Forward for the Subfield

Given the growing interest in how collective action matters, this special issue seeks to push our understanding of collective action outcomes beyond the present state of knowledge and stimulate further developments. In doing this, it looks to improve and expand the theoretical and conceptual tools for studying the topic, suggest and explore methodological innovations to solve previous research problems and investigate new settings across various movements and countries.

Gendering Outcomes: Different Paths, Similar Outcomes: An Analysis of Cross-Generational Biographical Consequences of Activism in Feminist Spaces

This article analyzes different paths leading to similar outcomes across three age-cohorts of activists in three feminist spaces in Italy. It addresses three challenges in the literature on biographical outcomes. First, it brings forward the methodological problem of recognizing crossing-points, which define a before-and-after in the activist's life course. Second, it improves the ways in which gender and sexuality are discussed in terms of biographical outcomes. Third, this empirical study elaborates the time in movement and the generational aspects of biographical outcomes, emphasizing the radical challenge of the younger cohorts and the long-term effects on the older cohort. This article suggests that only by deep case study, which incorporates different feminist spaces, we are able to better understand the gendered and generational biographical outcomes of feminist movements. These results can also be insightful for the analysis of other types of collective action outcomes.

Drivers of collective action and role of conflict in Kenyan fisheries co-management

Fisheries in Kenya are experiencing social-ecological changes, impacting how they are governed via co-management. At the local level, these changes influence collective action, by influencing ecosystems, livelihoods and social cohesion. A critical research gap is to understand how fisheries conflict influences outcomes of collective action and the broader development of fisheries. In this article, we present a novel inquiry that contributes to this gap by examining the interplay between conflict and collective action within the frame of social-ecological systems research. We apply qualitative research methods, integrating Bennett’s conflict typology into Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework, to present new evidence linking within and between group conflicts, to outcomes of collective action. We find leadership, gear technology, market dynamics, trust, cultural dependencies and past experiences influential in explaining dissimilar fisheries co-management outcomes in three cases. A closer look at fisheries co-management reveals that a sequence of early events, including conflict, has undermined collective action and sustainable resource use within fisheries, by altering social licence to operate and increasing transaction costs for decision making and cooperation. We use this empirical evidence to consider potential actions (e.g., recognising issue interdependencies and history) that can improve fisheries co-management in Kenya and thereby contribute to broader societal transformation.

Institutional Performance of Collective Irrigation Systems: A Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis in the Nile Delta of Egypt

Egypt, akin to many countries in the global South, has striven to promote collective management to overcome the challenges of irrigation management since the 1990s. Establishing shared pumping stations (SPSs) has been one of the cornerstones helping farmers better manage water for irrigation. Operating SPSs successfully poses collective action problems, for which there is no single set of solutions. This paper utilizes fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to identify which conditions or configurations are sufficient or necessary for well-operated SPSs. The study draws on empirical data gathered through semi-structured interviews from 45 cases, located in Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate in Egypt’s Nile Delta. Results show that three different paths are sufficient to ensure well-operated SPSs. These are: (1) the condition of effective rules related to allocation, monitoring, and sanctions; (2) the configuration of small group size of SPSs and large irrigated sizes of SPSs; or (3) the configuration of adequate water supply and appropriate location of the SPS command area. The paper concludes that neither group size nor resource size alone explains the outcome of collective action, while a combination of both factors does. Similarly, an adequate water supply is essential to enhance users’ engagement in collective actions only when resource location characteristics do not provide alternative water sources for irrigation.

Citizens of photography: visual activism, social media and rhetoric of collective action in Cambodia

ABSTRACT We are living in the age of photography. Photography and visual social media flood our communication channels and become embodied in our daily activities. People who can afford the medium of photography – people who are described here as ‘citizens of photography’ – use these channels to articulate and represent their grievances. These exemplify a form of visual activism and articulation that have long been discussed in social movement studies, yet the links between photography and social movements could benefit from further examination. Drawing on a socio-environmental movement case in Cambodia, this article interrogates how photographic and visual representations and social media shape the outcomes of collective action by discontented citizens. I argue that the ubiquity of visual devices and digital access to visual social media facilitates underprivileged citizens in grassroots movements to aesthetically exert influence on their targets in order to leverage their demands effectively. Beyond considering images as messengers and mediatization, the power of visual images inspires and provokes action: participation in the protest, and re-production and re-circulation of the images on social media. The power of visual images – produced by ordinary citizens – is the performative force that brings about change in the era of social media.

On Corruption and State Capture: The Struggle of Anti-Corruption Activism in Hungary

The article draws on social movement theory to understand collective action against corruption in Hungary. While offering a perspective on anti-corruption activism, the article demonstrates its limits against a set of unfavourable factors. Our enquiry reveals that the political context in which anti-corruption activism develops, that is, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, critically affects its mobilising potential. Closed political opportunities prompt anti-corruption activists to adopt outsider strategies; moreover, they shape the contentious content and resonance of their discourses. Overall, our interviews with prominent anti-corruption activists reveal the limited outcomes of collective action in this field.

Money as a Tool for Collective Action

Complementary currencies are usually seen as a by-product of collective movements for social change or as an institutional tool for local development: they are an outcome of collective action, not the origin of collective mobilisation. Empirical research on the Sardex complementary currency, though, suggests that money may support the emergence of collective action. Traditional economic theory considers any collective benefits provided by the economic system as the secondary effects of individual entrepreneurs seeking to maximise their profits. Entrepreneurs belonging to the Sardex network, though, do associate the use of the Sardex currency with direct collective benefits. This means they consider their business activities to be a form of collective action for promoting the common good of Sardinia's socio-economic development. Using the Sardex currency sets this collective action in motion: some Sardex members also work to expand the Sardex network without any expectation of economic gain.

Barely Bonded: Affective Politics and the Gendered Struggle for Water in Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru

Affect is increasingly understood as a critical element of political life and collective action in Latin America and elsewhere. It is critical to generating participation in collective action projects, sustaining or collapsing action, and how participants interpret the meanings and values of a project and the social relationships within it. More broadly, affective political experiences are markers of the sense of belonging or disaffection from others and broader political systems that are central to civic life. The meanings of participation after projects fade are often attributed mainly to the collective events themselves, and draw on one-off interviews after the events decline, or short ethnographies relatively close in time to the collective actions. As well, they often foreground the positive experiences that participants recall from collective action. Using 48 interviews and three years of participant observation, which followed 12 years of political and social engagement with women residents of Villa El Salvador (VES) in Lima, Peru, we challenge all three of these perspectives. The women were involved in a 20-year, materially successful, brokered collective action project to install water and sanitation systems in their neighborhood. The data reveal that long-term participants recalled actions in collective terms, but recounted affective experiences—mainly senses of abandonment and struggle—in individualistic terms. Unlike what most studies of collective action have concluded, these stories of being “barely bonded” to co-participants and leaders were not attributed to the collective actions themselves: they were told as part of stories of life-long gendered experiences of personal and state violence, state and family abandonment, and corrupt political practices in Peru. These affects were expressed with an insistence on sympathy from author 1, who has had long-term care relationships with people in VES. The methods and findings extend Latin American collective action scholarship that has documented disappointment and civil disaffection as outcomes of collective action, showing that longer-term forms of politics and relationships in which people’s political lives unfold (including with analysts), rather than collective action projects themselves, can reveal richer senses of the meanings of participation in collective action for civic life.

Can collective action address the “tragedy of the commons” in groundwater management? Insights from an Australian case study

Co-management through local collective action appeals as a way of effectively responding to critical groundwater management issues, including groundwater quality degradation and pumping that lowers water tables. Co-management may also build sufficient trust for stakeholders to agree to investigate, and potentially implement, new opportunities for the use and management of groundwater resources. This paper examines the potential of collective action to underpin co-management and lead to improved groundwater management. The case study is the Angas Bremer (AB) irrigation district in South Australia, which provides a rare example of community-lead groundwater management since the late 1970s. The key questions were: (1) Was the AB an example of collective action, and did that spark successful co-management? and, (2) What were the key outcomes of collective action throughout the years? Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders. By working together, and with government departments, AB irrigators successfully recovered an aquifer that was at risk of depletion and salinization. Drawing on this evidence, it is suggested that co-management through local collective action may be a useful option for those setting out to improve the social acceptability of new groundwater initiatives in farming landscapes, including managed aquifer recharge (MAR) and conjunctive use of surface water and groundwater.

Unraveling the Relationship between Collective Action and Social Learning: Evidence from Community Forest Management in Canada

An important outcome of social learning in the context of natural resource management is the potential for collective action—actions taken by a group of people that are the result of finding shared or common interest. Evidence of the relationship between collective action and social learning is beginning to emerge in the natural resource management literature in areas such as community forestry and participatory irrigation, but empirical evidence is sparse. Using a qualitative inquiry and research design involving a case study of the Wet’zinkw’a Community Forest Corporation, this paper presents research that examined the relationships between collective action and social learning through community forest management. Our findings show strong evidence of collective action outcomes on the part of board members responsible for the community forest, such as establishing a legacy fund, adding value to logs, protecting First Nations cultural values, and hiring locally. Our data also reveal that the actions taken by board members were encouraged through social learning that was related to acquiring (new) knowledge, developing an improved/deeper understanding, and building relationships. However, we found limited opportunities for community forest partners and the general public to learn and contribute to collective action outcomes since the actions taken and associated learning occurred mainly among board members.