Common Pool Resource Management Research Articles

Renewable resource use with imperfect self-control

We investigate renewable resource use when the harvesting agents face self-control problems. Individuals are conceptualized as dual selves. The rational long-run self plans for the infinite future while the affective short-run self desires to maximize instantaneous profits or utility. Depending on the degree of self-control, actual behavior is partly driven by short-run desires. In a model of a single harvesting agent (e.g. a fishery), we discuss how self-control problems affect harvesting behavior, resource conservation, and sustainability and discuss policies to curb overuse and potential collapse of the resource due to limited self-control. We then extend the model to several harvesting agents and show how limited self-control exacerbates the common pool problem. Finally, we investigate heterogenous agents and show that there are spillover effects of limited self-control in the sense that perfectly rational agents also behave less conservatively when they interact with agents with imperfect self-control.

Investigating the feasibility of developing a collective action for biological control of fall armyworm among smallholder farmers in rural communities of Zambia

BackgroundFall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, an alien invasive pest from the Americas, was detected in Zambia late 2016 and since has caused significant losses on maize threatening livelihood and food security. Individually, farmers continue to rely on synthetic pesticides, a reactive measure to manage new invasive insect pests, posing risks to human health, the environment and biodiversity. Biological control has been proven to be an efficient, cost effective and safe method for pest and disease management, and when adopted collectively, its effectiveness can increase. In addition, collective action has been acknowledged to be a critical component for invasive species management, but is still poorly studied in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) where the national plant health system, in-place to prevent and manage biological invasions, is limited.MethodsTo study the feasibility of creating a collective action to promote biological control for fall armyworm among smallholder farmers in rural Zambia and the social and institutional conditions needed for it to be successful and sustainable, we conducted focus group discussions and in-depth interviews in two districts with maize smallholder farmers. Our model to assess the results applies both Ostrom’s 8 Design Principles for a community-based management of common-pool resources and criteria of an agricultural innovation that meet the community’s requirements, and also pays attention to the exchange and brokering processes needed to match the two.ResultsOur results showed that some conditions are already in place to support a collective action to manage fall armyworm such as matching rules to local conditions, collective-choice arrangement, conflict-resolution mechanism and minimal recognition of rights to organize which are supported by traditional leadership of the communities. However other conditions would need to be strengthened for the collective pest management to be sustainable. The most important criteria for a pest management innovation selected by participants from both districts, in no specific order, were price, efficacy, recommended by agrodealer/extension officer and immediate action.ConclusionsThis study fills a gap in understanding social and institutional conditions in LMIC needed to sustain a collective action that aim at controlling a highly mobile and invasive pest. Our study emphasizes the need to redefine technologies and dissemination in terms of supporting the processes of co-designing innovation based on social and ecological conditions.

Evolutionary dynamics within and among competing groups

Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible for profound transitions in evolutionary history, including the origin of cellular life, multicellular life, and even societies. Here, we synthesize a growing literature that extends evolutionary game theory to describe multilevel evolutionary dynamics, using nested birth-death processes and partial differential equations to model natural selection acting on competition within and among groups of individuals. We analyze how mechanisms known to promote cooperation within a single group-including assortment, reciprocity, and population structure-alter evolutionary outcomes in the presence of competition among groups. We find that population structures most conducive to cooperation in multiscale systems can differ from those most conducive within a single group. Likewise, for competitive interactions with a continuous range of strategies we find that among-group selection may fail to produce socially optimal outcomes, but it can nonetheless produce second-best solutions that balance individual incentives to defect with the collective incentives for cooperation. We conclude by describing the broad applicability of multiscale evolutionary models to problems ranging from the production of diffusible metabolites in microbes to the management of common-pool resources in human societies.

Interdependent Self-Organizing Mechanisms for Cooperative Survival.

Cooperative survival "games" are situations in which, during a sequence of catastrophic events, no one survives unless everyone survives. Such situations can be further exacerbated by uncertainty over the timing and scale of the recurring catastrophes, while the resource management required for survival may depend on several interdependent subgames of resource extraction, distribution, and investment with conflicting priorities and preferences between survivors. In social systems, self-organization has been a critical feature of sustainability and survival; therefore, in this article we use the lens of artificial societies to investigate the effectiveness of socially constructed self-organization for cooperative survival games. We imagine a cooperative survival scenario with four parameters: scale, that is, n in an n-player game; uncertainty, with regard to the occurrence and magnitude of each catastrophe; complexity, concerning the number of subgames to be simultaneously "solved"; and opportunity, with respect to the number of self-organizing mechanisms available to the players. We design and implement a multiagent system for a situation composed of three entangled subgames-a stag hunt game, a common-pool resource management problem, and a collective risk dilemma-and specify algorithms for three self-organizing mechanisms for governance, trading, and forecasting. A series of experiments shows, as perhaps expected, a threshold for a critical mass of survivors and also that increasing dimensions of uncertainty and complexity require increasing opportunity for self-organization. Perhaps less expected are the ways in which self-organizing mechanisms may interact in pernicious but also self-reinforcing ways, highlighting the need for some reflection as a process in collective self-governance for cooperative survival.

Fishermen’s competitiveness and labour market performance: Evidence from shrimpers in Bangladesh

AbstractWe conduct an experiment to determine competitiveness among shrimpers who engage in collecting shrimp seeds in the southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh. We then examine how competitiveness affects the labour supply decisions and labour market performance of these shrimpers. Our results show that shrimpers who prefer competition are more productive than shrimpers who do not prefer competition. Competitive shrimpers secure better prices and earn higher incomes selling their catches. We estimate that their wage elasticity of participation ranges from 0.4 to 0.5, which is consistent with preferences under neoclassical assumptions. Competitive shrimpers have a slightly greater wage elasticity than non‐competitive shrimpers, suggesting that they might be more responsive to expected earnings. Our results have important policy implications for the efficient management of common pool resources.

Resetting the forestry commons: Constitutionality as a conflict resolution strategy in African woodlands

This paper comparatively analyses three case studies in Mali, Senegal and Tanzania regarding common property institutions for forest commons and their transformations during colonial and post-colonial times. Then common pool resource management was fragmented and common property was increasingly turned into state and private property and local control over resources was removed. This led to grabbing processes by foreign investors and conflicts between local and outside users of forest resources and degradation of these resources. The paper further outlines the reactions to these processes. It also highlights the neglect of the gender and marginal groups dimensions in studies of constitutionality (developing a sense of local ownership in the bottom-up institution crafting processes for the governance of the commons). In the cases of Mali and Senegal these constitutionality processes were for managing the forest resources. This led to a mitigation of existing resource conflicts. In Tanzania, out of a land-use conflict, local people had managed to create a kind of an informal convention with a British investor about land use in the valleys, which however remains fragile. The conflict arose because women had largely been left out in land deal negotiations and institution-building about the acquired land, as well as were confronted with institution-shopping by the investor and from below by fellow community- and family-men. This impacted heavily on their workload and hampered their abilities to fulfil their care work. Thus, this paper fills the gap on gender (and more differentiated – intersectionality, and generally the involvement of marginal groups) in the constitutionality process to support the “resetting of the forest commons”. These have been neglected factors that need to be addressed for successful forest resources management and governance.

From “Common Pools” to “Fish Pools”: Shifting Property Institutions in Traditional Waters of Norway and Canada

Although exclusive common pool resource management regimes have locally been applied since time immemorial in many coastal and fjord areas, in the legal conceptualization of space, the oceans and their living resources were traditionally treated as a “global commons.” The idea of restricting access to coastal oceanic resources and delegating their governance to state instruments has become increasingly popular since the middle of the previous century when political economy models predicted the eventual overexploitation or degradation of all resources used in common. While state jurisdictions overall continue to preserve the idea of common access to marine living resources for a state’s people, the rapid privatization of marine living resources and the subsequent development of aquaculture over the last few decades, often confront this understanding, leading to enclosure of a delineated maritime area that was initially intended to be accessible to the public. Enclosing the sea for the purpose of aquaculture development leads to a semantic change in property institutions that govern coastal areas and provides for a form of enclosure of the commons in key locations designated for marine aquaculture development. This article explores the concept of “ocean commons” and debates how the enclosure of common areas for the purposes of aquaculture development may collide with Indigenous and local conceptions of common pool resource management. The article applies this theoretical investigation on two examples from Canada and Norway, and suggests that rethinking aquaculture development in coastal waters through the lens of “ocean commons” may provide a guiding ethos for revisiting current approaches of access to the sea and ensuring the harmonious coexistence between aquaculture development and local/Indigenous traditional activities.

Games with possibly naive present-biased players

We propose a solution concept for games that are played among players with present-biased preferences that are possibly naive about their own, or about their opponent’s future time inconsistency. Our perception-perfect outcome essentially requires each player to take an action consistent with the subgame perfect equilibrium, given her perceptions concerning future types, and under the assumption that other present and future players have the same perceptions. Applications include a common pool problem and Rubinstein bargaining. When players are naive about their own time inconsistency and sophisticated about their opponent’s, the common pool problem is exacerbated, and Rubinstein bargaining breaks down completely.

Resource booms and group punishment in a coupled social-ecological system

Climate change is altering the dynamics of common pool resources around the world. We design an experimental game that varies both the flow of natural resources and the group punishment mechanisms available to resource users. Our experiments show that subjects are more likely to over-harvest when resource flows are high. But group punishment mechanisms that rely on social ostracism (as opposed to fines or fees) are more effective at mediating the desire to over-harvest when resources are booming. This suggests that collective management systems based on social norms, exclusion, and ostracism may be more resilient to unexpected changes in resource dynamics and supports bottom-up, as opposed to top-down, management of common pool resources.

A sustainability framework based on threats, consequences, and solutions (TCS) for managing watershed commons.

Sustainable management of common pool resources requires local information and participation. We develop a framework for managing commons based on threats, consequences, and solutions (TCS). The status of the community's interaction with their local commons is critical in developing viable solutions to avoiding the loss of natural resources, enhancing the benefits they provide, and sustaining the functions they perform. Threats to natural resources, the consequences of their depletion, and the solutions local communities perceive as most effective to prevent this loss are assessed as related to socioeconomic and landscape factors to develop strategies for the resilience of commons. Communities and representative stakeholders (224 respondents) participated in a survey in Honduras's Lake Yojoa watershed. The community's perception was also evaluated for impacts of changes in land use and climate on local commons. An ordinal logistic regression analysis was used to determine the effect of land use, geographic, and demographic factors on community perceptions. Distance to the lake, landcover percentages, slope, type of work, age, and importance of tourism were significant in influencing community interaction and perception of TCS. The involvement of communities in deriving knowledge on TCS is critical to increasing the resilience of local commons to emerging threats.

Introducing Quantum Variational Circuit for Efficient Management of Common Pool Resources

Introducing Quantum Variational Circuit for Efficient Management of Common Pool Resources

Smallholder social networks: Advice seeking and adaptation in rural Kenya

CONTEXTSmallholder farmers in Africa are among those most impacted by climate change. Employing strategies such as planting early maturing or drought tolerant hybrid seeds is one common climate adaptive strategy for these households. However, seed choice has become increasingly complex for farmers. One way farmers look for clarity about seeds is to consult with other farmers. OBJECTIVEWe investigate smallholders' advice seeking within the context of a community water project in rural Kenya, a type of community-based common pool resource management organization. We examine a maize seed advice seeking network and compare it with a more general advice seeking network to better understand the social networks of maize seed advice seeking, and to characterize how peer-to-peer advice networks might factor into farmer decision-making about seeds. METHODSWe use exponential random graph modeling for the maize seed advice and general advice networks to test what factors predict advice-seeking among farmers in 104, or 92% of households in the community water project. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSThe maize seed advice network is less dense than the general advice network, with farmers on average seeking out fewer people for advice about maize. The features that shape each network also differ. There are some farmers who are significantly more active in seeking advice about maize seeds, and farmers who are already employing more adaptive practices on their farm are more likely to seek such advice. Farmers also seek each other out based on homophily, kinship, and physical proximity, and some farmers are sought out more often. We find evidence that physical infrastructure of the community water project drives advice-seeking ties, where farmers who are attached to the same branch of the water infrastructure are likely to seek advice from each other. SIGNIFICANCEMaize seed is not a topic about which many farmers in this network seek advice, and those who might be perceived as more experienced or educated are not necessarily those most sought for advice. Farmers hold key information due to their on-farm experience, and in the absence of robust extension services and consistent information about hybrid seeds, it is unclear to what extent the advice seeking that farmers do undertake fills those gaps. In addition, co-management of a common-pool resource facilitates advice sharing in both the maize and general advice networks, that is, on topics outside of the immediate reason for being part of a CWP, which is water management.

Is prorationing efficiency-enhancing or rent-seeking?: Evidence from a natural experiment

Prorationing is used as a textbook definition of a solution to the market failure presented by the common pool aspects of oil and natural gas (see, for example, Spulber, 1989, 59). Yet, at the same time, the academic literature on this question is severely limited. To fill this void, we analyze a recent natural experiment in Oklahoma to determine the impact of rule changes that increased the stringency of prorationing and constrained natural gas production at the well level for one year. Prorationing in Oklahoma no longer serves to address common pool problems, as the affected hydraulically fractured wells do not suffer from common pool problems. Instead, we show that prorationing reduced natural gas production by large companies but had a significantly weaker impact on the production by small companies as well as those headquartered in Oklahoma. This gave the less affected companies an important competitive advantage. These findings are generally consistent with the positions that companies took to advocate for and against prorationing. The regulations can therefore be interpreted as a form of rent-seeking, with their proponents benefitting by imposing production limitations on their rivals. This work stimulates questions about the implications of prorationing in other states.

Effects of Water Policy Implementation and Management of Common Pool Resources in Turkana County, Kenya

Kenya and the sub-Saharan Africa nations could not accomplish the millennial advancement objectives plan on water and consequently the administration of water is in the core of manageable improvement objectives. This paper explored several reasons explaining why water policies are ineffective in Kenya, including; weak institutional frameworks, poor and unsustainable management schemes, fragmented approach to development of water resources and inadequate development of water infrastructure caused by conflict of interest by the implementing agencies. This study used descriptive research design, and targeted household heads and the county water staff in Loima Sub County. The study sample comprised 392 respondents. Data was collected using semi-structured questionnaire and KII. The study findings revealed that, community participation in water resource project management cycle was important for managing water as a shared resource. Moreover, the study established that non-governmental groups and the private sector were better at managing water as a shared resource. Furthermore, community participation in the management of water as a resource for common use was found not to be a determining factor in such management. The study concludes that water is a development challenge in Loima Sub County; it is thus essential to involve the community in the management of water as a common pool resource. The study therefore recommends that Turkana water government should improve performance of utilities through operationalize Turkana County Water Act 2019 and develop robust performance improvement plans based on diagnostic of the utility’s key challenges. Additionally, development of water and governance policy ought to guide management through co-creation in development of coherent and robust policy framework, operationalization roadmap and redesign the structure of water management committees through adoption of appropriate service delivery options based on context. Keywords: Water assets, Policy implementation, Decision making, Pool resources, Challenges

Rapid Urbanization in Ethiopia: Lakes as Drivers and Its Implication for the Management of Common Pool Resources

Recent history has been marked by a shift from rural to urban living. Studies show that urbanization is most prevalent at coastal areas and river basins and these are the locations where most megacities are established. However, in the African context, there is a deficit of research in this area. The focus of studies in the ‘urban’ field show the expansion of cities towards waterbodies but with little or no attention to the implications of this expansion—‘the rural to urban shift’—particularly as they concern lakes as commons in a rapidly urbanizing world, such as African countries and the Global South. Thus, using the case of lakes in Ethiopia, this study explores the trend of urbanization vis-à-vis lakes and its implications for the management of lakes, where historically the Ethiopian urban system has been characterized by settlements on mountain areas as strategic places located far from water bodies, particularly lakes. Using secondary data on population of urban centers and distribution of lakes in Ethiopia, this paper finds that urban centers that are located adjacent to lakes have been growing faster than those cities and towns that are not. The study argues that lakes are an attraction factor for urbanization. Moreover, rapid urban expansion around lakes implies that, in the future, the management of lakes (as common pool resources) critically depends on how urban centers are planned and managed.

Socio-demographic, institutional and governance factors influencing adaptive capacity of smallholder irrigators in Zimbabwe.

The provision of resilience and adaptation to climate change to smallholder irrigation communities is a critical component in implementing common pool resource management. Institutions in many smallholder irrigation schemes in developing countries are diverse and have potential to contribute to building climate resilience and improving livelihoods of smallholder irrigator. Human behaviour, institutional capacity and culture play important roles in shaping adaptive capacity of communities to climate change. Although much is known about how these contribute to this adaptive capacity, research focusing on their interaction is limited. In order to close this the gap, this study seeks to explore how socio-demographic, governance and institutional factors influence adaptive capacity in Exchange, Insukamini and Ruchanyu irrigation schemes. Questionnaire-based interviews, group discussions and key informant interviews were used for data collection. Adaptive capacity calculated using the livelihood vulnerability model was used as the dependent variable for this study. Ordinary least square regression was used to assess socio-demographic, institutional and governance factors influencing adaptive capacity in the smallholder irrigation scheme. The study reveals that adaptive capacity is influenced by age, gender, education, land tenure security, irrigation committee satisfaction, cooperatives, and interaction of factors. The link between age and gender were negatively moderated by awareness of irrigation policies, access to credit and land tenure security. Assessing factors influencing adaptive capacity help to improve the livelihoods of scheme farmers in the face of climate change.

Management of common pool resources in a nation-wide experiment

Dilemmas related to the use of environmental resources concern diverse populations at local or global scales. Frequently, individuals are unable to visualize the consequences of their actions, where they belong in the decision-making line, and have no information about past choices or the time horizon. We design a new one-shot extraction game to capture these dynamic decisions. We present results from a nationwide common pool resource experiment, conducted simultaneously in eleven French cities, involving a total of 2813 participants. We examine, for the first time, the simultaneous impact of several variables on the amount of resource extracted: the local vs. the national scale of the resource, the size of the group (small vs. big), the low vs. high recovery rate of the resource, and the available information. We show that individuals significantly reduce extraction levels in local as compared to national level dilemmas and that providing recommendations on sustainable extraction amounts significantly improves the sustainability of the resource. Overall, women extract significantly less, but care more about preserving the local resource; older participants extract significantly more resources but extract less from the national resource. Our experiment also fulfills a science popularization pedagogical aim, which we discuss.

Expanding narratives of governance constraints to improve coral reef conservation.

To understand and address the failures of reef governance, it is critical to understand the perceptions of diverse policy makers and practitioners about the challenges they face in achieving their goals. Examining the discourse of policy makers and practitioners can reveal the extent to which these perceptions capture the full spectrum of potential governance challenges, including those related to management, institutional structures and processes, the values and principles underpinning governance, and the social and environmental context. We conducted semistructured interviews with 110 policy makers and practitioners across multiple sectors, scales, and contexts in Barbados, St Kitts and Nevis, Belize, and Honduras. We used thematic qualitative analysis informed by theories of interactive governance and governability to examine the challenges perceived by governance actors. Perceived governance challenges were broadly consistent across countries, but differed by sector (V = 0.819, F6,60 = 1.502, p = 0.01) and by level (community compared with national) (V = 0.194, F1,10 = 2.178, = 0.026). Management inputs and outputs, challenges relating to the socioeconomic context, issues of leadership and power, and stakeholder engagement were commonly cited challenges (>75%). Few respondents discussed challenges relating to the ecological context, governance processes, or the values and principles underpinning governance. We argue that examining perceptions can inform efforts to improve governance and assess the appropriateness of particular management tools under context-specific governance constraints. Furthermore, expanding the narratives of governance challenges to encompass the subtle values and images underpinning governance, and the scale of the challenges faced, can help identify a wider set of opportunities for change.

The Role of Learning in Adaptation to Technology: The Case of Groundwater Extraction

Learning may play an important role in adopting new technology. While the role of learning in the decision to adopt has been widely investigated in the literature, to the best of our knowledge its role in knowing how to best use technology and the speed of learning has not been studied extensively. An example of this situation is when farmers adopt groundwater extraction technology. In this case, they need to learn the exact cost and benefit of extracting water in is relation to how they use it in practice. By comparing the extraction behavior of farmers who own new wells with farmers who own old wells, this paper explores the role of experience in shaping farmers’ decisions. Three identification strategies are used in this study to test the hypothesis that owners with less experience (owners of new wells) with groundwater technology are able to extract more water than experienced owners. The first strategy employs panel data. The results of this model show that groundwater extraction rises as the growth rate in the number of new wells increases. The second strategy uses the exogenous variation in precipitation shocks in a double-difference approach. Employing census data at the well level, this study shows that 6–13% more water is extracted from new wells than from older wells, and that the difference in extraction increases in areas that experience negative precipitation shocks. The third strategy uses the nearest-neighbor matching method, which shows that new wells extract 11% more groundwater per year compared to old wells, indicating that old wells are more efficient in maintaining their inter-temporal extraction. These findings have important implications for discussions of regulating a common pool resource. In the literature regarding the common pool problem, firms are often considered entities with complete information about their true abatement costs. An implication of findings of this paper is that quantity instruments for regulating groundwater extraction fail to guarantee productive efficiency when farmers face uncertainty about their marginal abatement cost. The results of this study show that it takes a few years for farmers to adapt to new technologies. According to this finding, a recommendation to policy makers, therefore, is that they must consider this time lag in learning how to use new technologies when proposing policies to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The Moderating Effects of Social Norms on Pre-merger Overspending: Results from a Survey Experiment

The proposition that amalgamation reforms lead to a common-pool problem is strongly supported; governments are incentivized to overspend before the merger is implemented. However, existing literature helps little in understanding why some governments do not overspend in the pre-merger period, and why hoarders do not overspend more than they do. One explanation hitherto overlooked is the moderating effect of social norms. Two hypotheses regarding the importance of social norms are tested with data from a survey experiment conducted on over 3,000 Norwegian local elected officials. The analysis supports both: Support for hoarding is lower when hoarding is debt-financed than when financed by savings. Support for hoarding is also lower when others in the amalgamation are anticipated not to hoard than when they are. That pre-merger hoarding varies with different levels of social obligations vis-à-vis the amalgamation has implications for common-pool theory and for reformers of the structure of government.