Common Pool Resource Management Research Articles

Evaluating Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs)’ Performance in Managing Community Forests: A Case Study in Central Nepal

The community forests (CF) in Nepal, facilitated by Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs), is widely recognized as an effective model of community-based forest management. Despite this recognition, there is a notable lack of comprehensive studies assessing the performance of CFUGs in sustaining community forests. Addressing this gap, this study examined twenty-two indicators across five performance criteria, such as user group management, forest management, financial management, livelihood management, and collaboration and networking management, within four CFUGs in central Nepal. Data were collected through household surveys (n = 275) and focus group discussions (n = 4), and indicators of performance criteria were assessed using a Likert scale. Reliability was measured using the coefficient of Cronbach’s alpha. ANOVA was employed to compare mean performance criteria across the four CFUGs, providing an evaluative perspective on overall CFUG performance. The findings underscored collaboration and networking management as high performers, showing an index value of 0.71, while user group management exhibited moderate performance with an index value of 0.56, alongside other moderately performing criteria. Noteworthy disparities were evident across the four performance criteria (p < 0.01), with the exception of collaboration and network management. Approximately 55% of the indicators were rated low to moderate, revealing CFUGs’ deficiencies in regular functions, limited uptake of adaptive and market-oriented management practices, minimal contributions to biodiversity conservation, insufficient capacity for forest revenue generation and mobilization, and restricted income generation and benefit-sharing with communities. The absence of timely and pertinent actions further stifled interaction between CFUGs and community forests, undermining the potential for revenue generation, job creation, and collective actions essential for productive community forest management. Prioritization of the indicators based on the performance index value offers critical policy direction to ensure CFUG sustainability and augment participatory management of common pool resources. Strategies to address identified weaknesses and build on strengths are essential for the success of Nepal’s community forests.

Household characteristics and common property forest use: complementarities and contradictions

Being limited in supply but accessible for community usage, sustainable management of Common pool resources is still an important question facing both development planners and the academia. Experience from community forestry program in Nepal, and elsewhere, has so far indicated that poorer households are still marginalized even if resources are managed under community ownership. In this paper, I seek to analyze the socio-economic attributes of households that determine labor allocation decisions for forest product collection activities. This will help better understand why poorer groups have not been benefited from the management of community forests. I will then highlight the need for more effective policy and institutional interventions that would help ensure efficient and equitable access to the local level natural resource base.

The oyster revolution: shell middens, shell temper, and settling down in North America’s Chesapeake region

Transformative social change occurred in the Chesapeake region with the intensification of oyster harvesting and the establishment of central places in estuarine settings at the outset of the Middle Woodland period (ca. A.D. 200). Accompanying the pivot toward estuarine living was the spread of shell-tempered ceramics indexing regional social networks from the Delaware Bay to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Survey and excavation data from the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown (NWSY) on the York River trace this process on Virginia’s lower York River. Here, Middle Woodland populations established central places around the lower embayed portions of tidal creeks. Communal shell middens anchoring these central places offer evidence of intensive oyster harvesting and a history of periodic overharvesting, adjustment, and long-term sustainability. We hypothesize that common pool resource management, i.e., collective action and stewardship in the management of the oyster fishery, was an important part of Native societies’ settling down in this region.

Exploring Elinor Ostrom's principles for collaborative group working within a user-led project: lessons from a collaboration between researchers and a user-led organisation

BackgroundSome research has been undertaken into the mechanisms that shape successful participatory approaches in the context of efforts to improve health and social care. However, greater attention needs to be directed to how partnerships between researchers and user-led organisations (ULOs) might best be formed, practiced, managed, and assessed. We explored whether political economist Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning analysis of common pool resource management—specifically eight principles to enhance collaborative group working as derived from her empirical research—could be usefully applied within a user-led project aiming to co-design new services to support more inclusive involvement of Disabled people in decision-making processes in policy and practice.MethodsParticipant observation and participatory methods over a 16-month period comprising observational notes of online user-led meetings (26 h), online study team meetings (20 h), online Joint Interpretive Forum meetings (8 h), and semi-structured one-to-one interviews with project participants (44 h) at two time points (months 6 and 10).ResultsInitially it proved difficult to establish working practices informed by Ostrom’s principles for collaborative group working within the user-led project. Several attempts were made to put a structure in place that met the needs of both the research study and the aims of the user-led project, but this was not straightforward. An important shift saw a move away from directly applying the principles to the working practices of the group and instead applying them to specific tasks the group were undertaking. This was a helpful realisation which enabled the principles to become—for most but not all participants—a useful facilitation device in the latter stages of the project. Eventually we applied the principles in a way that was useful and enabled collaboration between researchers and a ULO (albeit in unexpected ways).ConclusionsOur joint reflections emphasise the importance of being reflexive and responsive when seeking to apply theories of collaboration (the principles) within user-led work. At an early stage, it is important to agree shared definitions and understanding of what ‘user-led’ means in practice. It is crucial to actively adapt and translate the principles in ways that make them more accessible and applicable within groups where prior knowledge of their origins is both unlikely and unnecessary.

Village-Based Common Pool Resource Management: Clean Water Management to Overcome Water Crisis Problems in Prambanan Hills

This study examines the management of common pool resources in the context of clean water management by the village. This research departs from the lack of water availability for Prambanan residents who live in hilly areas, this is especially true when entering the dry season. The purpose of this study is to explain that the village is the right institution for managing shared resources or common pool resources where the Village Government and Water User Management Organizations (OPPA) are the factors that determine the success of using common pool resources in meeting clean water needs for the community. With the method of collecting data through observation, interviews, and documentation related to the required data. This research is qualitative research, with the study method being a qualitative case study. Based on the results of research and data analysis obtained, some of the efforts that have been made by the Government cannot be said to be effective and are not a solution to overcome the drought problem in Kapanewon Prambanan hilly areas but after the management is handed over to the village the distribution of water becomes more even for the community. In conclusion, in the management of shared resources or common pool resources, villages are the right institutions to manage shared resources or common pool resources because they are distributed more evenly to the community and can improve the welfare of the village community itself. With the management of clean water by the village, the burden of the government in overcoming the drought problem in the community can be overcome.

The fiscal effects of cross-prefectural border municipal mergers: evidence from Japan using the synthetic control method

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to investigate whether social connectedness can mitigate the fiscal common pool problem in municipal mergers, as many studies have primarily focused on whether this problem occurs. I employ the synthetic control method by using higher-level government borders to identify the moderating effects of social connectedness. The findings reveal that subordinate partners in cross-prefectural border mergers significantly reduce their bonds and construction expenses just before the mergers. Merger partners with strong incentives to merge do not create fiscal common pool problems, which is the opposite of previous studies. The result might imply the potential effectiveness of merger support policies that prioritize social connectedness.

How and why do rangeland changes and their underlying drivers differ across Namibia’s two major land-tenure systems?

Rangeland degradation, with the loss of perennial grasses and shrub encroachment, negatively affects livestock production and reduces the drought resilience of commercial ranchers and pastoralists in drylands. This situation applies in Namibia, where few attempts have been made to investigate rangeland changes and shrub encroachment across the two major land-tenure systems in the country, namely, freehold and communal land. This study aimed to investigate the inter-relationships among rangeland changes, land tenure and management in Namibia within the past 55 years, by combining remote-sensing analysis, literature review, and interviews. Land-cover classification results revealed different trends in the two tenure systems between 1965 and 2020. Both were affected by shrub invasion. At the onset of the observation period, the percentage of grass-dominated savanna was higher on communal land. Whereas a linear increase in shrubland was observed after 1965 on communal land and on freehold land up to 2001, the shrub encroachment trend on freehold land reversed from 2011, mainly because of de-bushing measures. The most important drivers for rangeland changes and shrub encroachment were related to specific land-management practices and the historical and socio-economic contexts in which they occurred, including various policies associated with colonialism, fire suppression and overgrazing, combined with recurrent droughts. Although farmers on freehold land apply various strategies to combat shrub encroachment, the aftermaths of colonial policies and the issues of common-pool resource management have limited the options of those on communal land to implement such measures. The search for sustainable management options, thus, requires a deeper understanding of their potentials and shortcomings in both land-tenure types; such understanding could be acquired by considering local knowledge and past and current land-use practices. Management options that incorporate the numerous benefits of woody plants and the uses of shrubs hold promise for sustaining livelihoods in both land-tenure systems.

Untangling Humpback Whale-Watching Management Networks: Collaboration and Conflict in the Northeast Pacific

Humpback whales face emerging anthropogenic challenges such as entanglement in abandoned fishing gear and stranding during their winter migration. Such challenges require collective action solutions involving diverse stakeholders across jurisdictions, social sectors, and geographies. Collaborative governance systems involve conflictual and collaborative interactions. We used a quantitative approach (social network analysis) to map the structure of three social networks: Collaboration in disentanglement, collaboration in stranding, and conflict. We administered a face-to-face survey to 38 stakeholders from four social sectors across seven coastal localities from April to November 2021. We also obtained perspectives from the same stakeholders about pressing conflicts, rule compliance, and law enforcement regarding whale-watching management in the region using a semi-structured questionnaire. We found hints of different dimensions of collaboration occurring simultaneously: Coordination, cooperation, and conflict. Networks played distinct roles in promoting collaboration across sectors, and while the disentanglement network coordinated civil society and the public sector, the stranding network facilitated cooperation within the public sector. The most pressing social conflicts detected by stakeholders were pleasure boats, abandoned fishing gear, and poor rule compliance regarding the distance between boats and whales. Our results suggest that in the context of institutional weakness, collaborative social networks play a crucial role in the management and conservation of coastal and marine common-pool resources.

Long-distance social relationships can both undercut and promote local natural resource management.

The management of large common-pool resources, like fisheries and forests, is more difficult when more people and more communities can access them-a particular problem given increased population sizes, higher mobility and globalized trade in the Anthropocene. Social relationships spanning communities, such as kin relationships, business or trade relationships and friendships, can make management even more challenging by facilitating and transmitting norms of overharvesting. However, these long-distance relationships can also bolster management by transmitting norms for sustainability, promoting interdependence and laying the groundwork for nested management systems. Here, we review the negative and positive impacts of long-distance relationships on local natural resource management (NRM), providing illustrative examples from our field research on forest and fisheries management in Tanzania. Drawing on the evolutionary literature, the development literature and our field data, we offer suggestions for how development partners can avoid the pitfalls of long-distance relationships and how they can use or even deliberately foster long-distance relationships to promote successful local NRM. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.

Introduction: What Scholars Know (and Need to Know) about the Politics of Climate Change

Climate change is fundamentally a political problem; it is not merely a technical or economic challenge but rather an arena for sharp conflicts over the distribution of gains and losses and the associated ethical challenges. However, as Keohane (2015), Javeline (2014), and Green and Hale (2017) noted in PS: Political Science & Politics and Perspectives on Politics, research on climate change has not been traditionally central to mainstream political science. Field journals including Global Environmental Politics and Environmental Politics have made important contributions in this regard, and leading university presses have published important books on climate issues. However, the neglect of climate politics by mainstream journals is surprising—although we note the recent Perspective on Politics symposium on Green Political Science—because political scientists have devoted considerable attention to studying environmental politics at the community (Ostrom 1990), national (Kelemen and Vogel 2010), and international (Young 1994) levels. Indeed, there is robust literature on the management of common pool resources, national styles of environmental regulation, and environmental social movements, as well as global environmental regimes. Yet, the topic of climate change—an important subject in the study of environmental politics—too often has been neglected by mainstream political science.

Collective Resource Management and Labor Quota Systems for Sustainable Natural Resource Management in Semi-Arid Ethiopia

Since the mid-1970s, natural resource management package programs have been implemented mainly in the northern Ethiopian Highlands (Amhara and Tigray regions), providing participants with food-for-work (FFW) supported by donor agencies. Meanwhile, the government has sporadically implemented such programs in the Ethiopian Lowlands, including the semi-arid Ethiopian Rift Valley (the study area). Local villagers took the initiative to manage various natural and life resources. In this study, the following factors were determined: (i) the type of village organization that manages common-pool resources (CPRs) and controls collective work, and (ii) the kind of institutional arrangements that should be implemented in participatory CPR management and small-scale village infrastructure development programs. These issues were investigated using mixed methods research, combining multivariate analyses, interviews, and field observation. The analyses were compared specifically with advanced participatory CPR management in Tigray, northern semi-arid Ethiopia. Tigray has an indigenous labor quota system (baito) and a collective grazing land management system (hizati) at the hamlet (qushet) level. Since 1991, the Tigray government has incorporated hamlets into the local administration system and supplied FFW and other incentives to participants with a high participation rate in the baito collective work. Those institutional arrangements helped reduce soil erosion rates and restore grass and tree biomass in the area. In the study area, user groups and youth and women’s associations were (and still are) institutionally fragile CPR organizations (e.g., no bylaws). In contrast, an iddir is a robust CPR organization at the hamlet (gott) level having a labor quota system (iddir system) and funds. The requirements for sustainable participatory rural development in the two regions of semi-arid Ethiopia are, first, to institutionalize a local administration system that links the district, village, and hamlet; and second, to use various incentives provided by donor agencies to strengthen their indigenous labor quota systems.

Health Expenditure Decentralization and Health Outcomes: The Importance of Governance

Abstract Does health expenditure decentralization improve a nation’s health? Should countries care about governance quality when they decentralize healthcare spending to local governments? We answer these questions using cross-country data comprising fifty countries from 1996 to 2018. We find that health spending decentralization worsens health outcomes, which are offset by better governance of government. We calibrate the maximum feasible degree of health expenditure decentralization to have positive effects on health outcomes for a given percentile distribution of governance quality. Countries should be mindful of this negative consequence of health spending decentralization and should ensure that the quality of their governance exceeds a certain threshold to offset this negative externality. We also find that vertical fiscal imbalance is negatively associated with health outcomes, underscoring the role of revenue decentralization in improving the fiscal discipline of local governments by avoiding moral hazard caused by soft budget constraints and the common pool problem.

The impact of a scholarship programme on social capital formation among university students: An economic experiment at the University of Pretoria, South Africa

This study uses an online laboratory experiment and a post-experimental survey to test whether the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) scholarship programme causally influences the creation of cognitive social capital among University of Pretoria recipients. Cognitive social capital, which is based on commonly shared norms among subjects, leads to honest and cooperative behaviour. It is necessary for ease of information flow, a reduction in transaction costs, and allowing communities to deal with social dilemmas like common-pool resource management. The study used incentivised economic experiments on randomly selected subjects drawn from a control group (non-MCF students) and a treated group (MCF students). The experimental results from the two groups were compared to check the differences in terms of levels of trust, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. Our results show that the scholarship programme has a significant impact only on levels of in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination. The post-experimental survey showed that MCF and non-MCF subjects were similar in terms of stated pro-social behaviour perceptions and in-group social capital creation.

Devolution of tenure rights in forestland in China: Impact on investment and forest growth

I investigate whether devolution of forestland tenure rights to households in China triggered forest investment and the impact on forest conditions. I use a panel dataset of a two-round survey of over 10,000 forestland plots held by 1500 households in eight provinces before and after the devolution. Using a quasi-experimental regression approach, I find that forestland devolved to households has higher per-area-unit, yearly labor input and capital investment. I also find larger forest cover in regions devolving more. The findings support that clearly-defined and well-protected household property rights offer an effective alternative to common-pool resources management in small-scale forestry.

지방의회의 규모는 재정 지출에 영향을 미치는가

This paper examines whether there exists an impact of the size of local councils on government spending in Japanese local governments. I focus on the fact that the maximum number of council members of municipal councils in Japan has been bound by law, and estimates this by RDD. Then, we examine the existence and positivity or negativity of the effect of council size. My estimation results show that an increase in council size leads to an increase in government spending for the “small and medium-sized groups,” while the opposite is true for the “medium and large groups. The author believes that the common pool problem of increasing government spending does not change with the size of the municipality. Therefore, the difference in the estimated results may be due to differences in the oversight function of councils. A result of this paper suggest that the size of local council members may contribute to the achievement of sound public finances.

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.