Institutions and Agency in Creating Collective Action for Common Pool Resources (original) (raw)
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CIRANO Le CIRANO est un organisme sans but lucratif constitué en vertu de la Loi des compagnies du Québec. Le financement de son infrastructure et de ses activités de recherche provient des cotisations de ses organisations-membres, d'une subvention d'infrastructure du gouvernement du Québec, de même que des subventions et mandats obtenus par ses équipes de recherche. CIRANO is a private non-profit organization incorporated under the Quebec Companies Act. Its infrastructure and research activities are funded through fees paid by member organizations, an infrastructure grant from the government of Quebec, and grants and research mandates obtained by its research teams.
Society & Natural Resources, 1999
The mechanism through which exit options and outside opportunities affect cooperation outcomes has not been well studied in the resource management literature, since a deep analysis of the concepts of "exit options" and "outside opportunities" is missing. This article analyzes these concepts across the common pool resource management literature, investigates the factors that underlie "opting out" decisions, and reviews potential ways to operationalize these concepts for empirical analysis. It also explores how the relationship of cooperation and exit options may be influenced by broad economic processes, such as economic integration.
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The classical theoretical prediction for the "commons dilemma" is as tragedy. The situation popularized as "the tragedy of the commons" became intriguing because beneath this unfortunate and surely undesired result of collective action laid the model of "rational actor". Yet, the messiness of alternative theories of human behavior has been motive of hesitation to adopt more realistic assumptions than those of the rational choice to address collective action. Still, a deeper understanding of the interplay among cognition, values systems, and institutions should be the starting point for any discussion of societal change. In this paper, we present a new approach to advance the theory of collective action by combining the framework of institutional analysis with Clare Graves's theory of adult biopsychosocial development. Moreover, we sketch an empirical strategy for investigating the behavioral hypotheses resulting from the Graves' model using expe...
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Academia Letters, 2022
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Collective action problems are ubiquitous in situations involving human interactions and therefore lie at the heart of economy and political science. In one of the most salient statements on this topic, Elinor Ostrom (co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) even claims that "the theory of collective action is the central subject of political science". The current volume, Modern Dilemmas: Understanding Collective Action in the 21st Century, is a collection of essays which target the problem of collective action from both a theoretical and applied perspective. The volume consists of four parts, each of these providing insights into different research fields. Thus, the first part, Theoretical Approaches, offers a guideline to the study of collective action in public choice theory and rational choice institutionalism and shows how it can be connected to other research programs such as constructivism, social network analysis and contractualism. The second part, Collective Action and Responsibility, tackles issues specific to political philosophy such as collective and individual responsibility and the morality of free-riding behavior. The third part, Collective Action and Public Policies, presents empirical studies on collective action in relation to educational policies, health policies and policies which target food security. Finally, the fourth part, Collective Action, Political Institutions and Social Movements, consists of various studies on classical problems of collective action such as political protests and revolutions, but also problems which are not traditionally associated with collective action such as party funding and the role of international organizations in economic recessions. The multidisciplinary character of the volume therefore makes it an interesting reading for students and scholars working in a number of different areas of study, such as political science, economy, political philosophy, public policies, comparative politics and international relations.
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The collective action problem, by which individual rationality disrupts collective action, implies that individuals will not cooperate to overcome environmental problems. The theories of the collective action problem also set out suggestions for how to change individual rationality. Case studies of actions carried out in the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries show that these theories do work. By making individuals feel as if their actions have an impact, they will change their behaviour and act in compliance with the environmental schemes. What constitutes an impact will vary from person to person, but the idea is that we, as individuals, need to be assured that our effort to change is not in vain.
Last few decades the development literature has emphasized the important role of social groups and communities to solve a wide range of economic problems that neither the market nor the State can effectively tackle (Baland and Platteau, 1995). These problems include the production of local public goods, the internalization ecological externalities, the insurance of poor people against various kinds of risk and uncertainty through the locally-evolved community arrangements and self-provisioning village economies. But the conventional models and the current development strategies which are based on the open access models of 'tragedy of the commons' overemphasize the solutions of privatization and State control at the expense of locally-evolved institutions and self-governance. The evidence from the study suggests that the locally-evolved customary practices and a much more elaborated CP institutions are very much present in India and in much of the southeast Asia and even western village societies. This evidence very much refute the theoretical assumptions of prevailing models of development that overemphasize the privatization or state control as a management solution. Further, such state intervention with total disregard to the traditional CP institutions, only contributed to the impoverishment of village economies.
The Logic of Collective Action Revisited The Logic of Collective Action Revisited
2018
Since Mancur Olson's "Logic of collective action" it is common conviction in social sciences that in large groups the prospects of a successful organization of collective actions are rather bad. Following Olson's logic, the impact of an individual's costly contribution becomes smaller if the group gets larger and, consequently, the incentive to cooperate decreases with group size. Conducting a series of laboratory experiments with large groups of up to 100 subjects, we demonstrate that Olson's logic does not generally account for observed behavior. Large groups in which the impact of an individual contribution is almost negligible are still able to provide a public good in the same way as small groups in which the impact of an individual contribution is much higher. Nevertheless, we find that small variations of the MPCR in large groups have a strong effect on contributions. We develop a hypothesis concerning the interplay of MPCR and group size, which is b...