Search

This paper investigates the effects of internal in-migration on cooperation in rural farming communities in Zambia. Potentially, in-migration could trigger discrimination, decrease overall levels of trust, and hence negatively impact the propensity for collective action. We measure cooperative behavior through self-reported survey information and incentivized decisions in a lab-in-the-field experiment. First, we find no evidence in the survey and experimental data that in-migration negatively affects cooperation across villages. Second, we find evidence that in villages where income inequalities between migrants and locals are more pronounced, migrants contribute more to public goods if exposed as the minority in the experiment.

Enhancing the capacity of social‐ecological systems (SES) to adapt to climate change is of crucial importance. While gradual climate change impacts have been the main focus of much recent research, much less is known about how SES are impacted by climate extremes and how they adapt. Here, based on an advanced conceptualization of social‐ecological resilience, performed by an interdisciplinary group of scientists, we outline three major challenges for operationalizing the resilience concept with particular focus on climate extremes. First, we discuss the necessary steps required to identify and measure relevant variables for capturing the full response spectrum of the coupled social and ecological components of SES. Second, we examine how climate extreme impacts on coupling flows in SES can be quantified by learning from past societal transitions or adaptations to climate extremes and resulting changes in ecosystem service supply. Last, we explore how to identify management options for maintaining and enhancing social‐ecological resilience under a changing regime of climate extremes. We conclude that multiple pathways within adaptation and mitigation strategies which enhance the adaptive capacity of SES to absorb climate extremes will open the way toward a sustainable future.

Ecosystems and society are strongly interlinked and are, therefore, considered as coupled social-ecological systems (SESs). A promising approach for assessing the impacts of climate extremes is based on the concept of social-ecological resilience (SER), which defines the capacity of a SES to delay the impact, reduce the severity of the impact and enhance recovery from it. The operationalization of the SER concept requires the integration of ecological resilience and of transformational processes of society. In this chapter, we provide examples from five transdisciplinary research projects, in which social and natural scientists have been involved, with a high degree of participation of nonacademic actors. We show how the resilience of coupled SESs is affected by climate extremes in different ways and how a transformation toward future SES and enhanced SER can be achieved. We show that, generally, diversification of ecosystems as well as of societal processes such as ecosystem management and communication strategies is an asset for increased resilience of SES to climate extremes.

We examine whether advertising the scientific soundness of an aid project or advertising the quality of an aid organisation influences donation behaviour compared to a standard emotional appeal. Using survey experiments at three universities in Austria and Germany (n = 578), we find that average donations of 14 Euros increased by 8 Euros in the treatment group that received information indicating that the project was evaluated using a randomised controlled trial (RCT). We find no effect for advertising that the organisation has earned a seal of quality. Since the majority of non-profits have already earned such a seal, people might become sceptical if an aid agency emphasises their trustworthiness, a trait that is assumed to be a given. Our results highlight that not only aid recipients but also aid organisations can benefit from adopting rigorously evaluated projects and carrying out RCTs in terms of increased income from charitable giving.

Mutual aid among villagers in developing countries is often the only means of insuring against economic shocks. We use “lab-in-the-field experiments” in Cambodian villages to study solidarity in established and newly resettled communities. Our experimental participants were part of an agricultural land-distribution project for which they signed up voluntarily. Half of our sample voluntarily resettled one and a half years before this study. Playing a version of the “solidarity game,” we identify the effect of voluntary resettlement on willingness to help anonymous fellow villagers. We find that resettled farmers transfer substantially less money to their fellow villagers than farmers who have not resettled. Our experimental results indicate greater vulnerability on the part of resettled households in the initial years after resettlement.

This paper analyses the behaviour of customers in a flower field, where payment is made into an honour box. There is a price indicated for the flowers. However, as no monitoring takes place and the farmer has never enforced formal law, people can decide how much they want to pay. If people were to make a narrow rational choice, they would simply take the unsupervised flowers without paying and the market would collapse. However, payments were and are in general high enough to make considerable profits. The business is flourishing. In the experiment, we left several different messages next to the cashbox to influence payments. Legal threats and moral appeals were studied in similar field settings with mixed results. We hypothesize that legal threats and moral appeals are less important than the context in which people make their decision. Once we indicated that the flower field belonged to a family, turnover and payment rate per customer increased substantially. We also observed a switch to fewer but more expensive flowers. However, no significant results were obtained for other treatments: consulting framing, moral appeal and legal threats. The results show that to understand the market success of a business, we have to investigate the expectations and opinions which people associate with the specific business context.

Summary Extortive petty corruption takes place when a public official elicits small bribes from citizens for providing public services that the citizens are legally entitled to receive. We implement a novel experimental design that mimics this phenomenon and explores bottom-up approaches for its mitigation. In different setups we examine how monitoring by citizens affects public official’s tendency to demand bribes and whether citizens are more willing to engage in monitoring if they can recommend rather than report. Our results are mixed. Recommendations seem to perform better in environments with personal and repeated interactions, where reports might cause discontent and further disadvantaged treatment by public officials. In contrast, reports and the sanctions these potentially cause are more likely to deter public officials from extortive behavior in settings similar to the stranger matching protocol. Regarding citizen’s monitoring involvement, we find a strong preference for recommendations over reports, even among stranger matching treatments. Moreover, independent of the matching protocol and the endogenous monitoring mechanism, we find that agents in both roles are sensitive to monitoring and detection rate variations: public officials in their decision to demand a bribe and citizens in their decision to monitor.

Globally, marine protected areas (MPAs) are prominent conservation tools. Yet, the understanding of their social effects remains limited. Our multimethod approach relied on lab-in-the-field economic experiments (n = 127) in two MPA and two non-MPA communities in Baja California, Mexico. We also deployed a standardized fishers' survey (n = 544) to verify the external validity of our findings and expert informant interviews (n = 77) to develop potential explanatory mechanisms. In MPA sites, cooperation and hypercompetitive behavior are significantly higher, and the presence of hypercompetition does not seem to have a negative effect on collective action. We suggest that institutional interventions for the development of the MPAs jointly with market integration and economic diversification are the main potential mechanisms for the simultaneity of observed pro- and antisocial behavior. By providing a different perspective to understand the social effects of MPAs, we bring together conservation science with resource governance, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and behavioral economics.

Network concepts are central to at least three challenges of interest in the sustainability science literature: how to link knowledge with action, how to enhance collective action, and how to promote social learning. Although each challenge has developed into a coherent literature, social network concepts—which examine the particular ways in which social agents relate to one another—emerge as a common theme across all three challenges. To build a synthetic understanding of networks and sustainability, we must consider how structural properties of networks relate to sustainability outcomes, how networks evolve over time, and how institutional context influences this evolutionary process. A better understanding of these questions can inform strategies to promote patterns of social interaction that support sustainability.

Targeted illegal harvesting of hardwood in the woodland of Namibia’s Kavango region threatens forest stands. In a transforming setting, where wood is increasingly traded through value chains on a globalized market, local harvesters have complex incentives but also a crucially important position. Sustainability largely depends on their choices. Such choices are being influenced by awareness campaigns and decentralized forest management, which are being lauded and supported. Having produced an ethnographic awareness film (AF) on the problem of logging and the opportunities for community forests (CF) to reduce extractions while raising community income, we approach the influence of the instruments of film and community forests on forest-users’ real life choices with an economic public goods game. We compare villages that have experienced influences to a differing degree. We find more extraction in AF and no effect for CF at village level. Instead, the extractive impact of certain experimental and free riding personality types, whose strategies remain stable across the experiment, is equally distributed among villages. We discuss methodological implications and the fact that in a situation of ecological and socio-economic challenges certain players use game and real life opportunities to decouple individual choice from problem awareness and the social control-setting.

Summary Namaqualand government officials face a strong obligation to empower formerly disadvantaged communities by delegating tasks or devolving power. Theoretically, the external agents capitalize on existing network structures, norms, and trust relations within a village in order to stimulate collective action. In practice, single purpose committees are often set up in communities with high unemployment and where people have no resources for successful collective action. This study aggregates household level data and combines it with a community level survey to provide evidence that a high number of externally initiated committees have a negative effect on aggregated trust and reciprocity within a community. This is caused by a stronger lack of downward accountability and transparency as well as coordination problems leading to unclear leadership. Further, a comparison between the “old” and “new” commons shows that because communities have different histories and thus different social cohesion and fundraising willingness, their relative advantages in the devolution process differ.

We present econometric evidence of how sociodemographic characteristics, economic background, group effects, and dynamic personal and group interactions influence the co-operative behaviour of individuals in a social dilemma situation. The data are from a framed common-pool resource experiment conducted in Namibian and South African farming communities. Our estimates suggest complex but stable social dynamics within groups over the course of the game. We conclude that group interactions may be significantly influenced by the degree of sociodemographic heterogeneity. Our study shows that the introduction of rules matters, as it improves co-operation, but that the concrete shape of such rules may be less important than the underlying social interaction.

Common pool resource experiments in the laboratory and the field have provided insights that have contrasted to those derived from conventional non-cooperative game theory. Contrary to predictions from non-cooperative game theory, participants are sometimes willing to restrain voluntarily from over extracting resources and use costly punishment to sanction other participants. Something as simple as face-to-face communication has been shown to increase average earnings significantly. In the next generation of experiments, both in the laboratory and in the field, we need to extract more information that provides insight concerning why people make the decisions they make. More information is needed concerning attributes of individuals as well as the social and social-ecological context in which they interact that may give rise to such deviations from theoretical predictions. In the process of extracting more information from participants and the contexts in which they interact, we face several methodological and ethical challenges which we address in this paper.

Overexploitation of common-pool resources, resulting from uncooperative harvest behavior, is a major problem in many social-ecological systems. Feedbacks between user behavior and resource productivity induce non-linear dynamics in the harvest and the resource stock that complicate the understanding and the prediction of the co-evolutionary system. With an adaptive model constrained by data from a behavioral economic experiment, we show that users’ expectations of future pay-offs vary as a result of the previous harvest experience, the time-horizon, and the ability to communicate. In our model, harvest behavior is a trait that adjusts to continuously changing potential returns according to a trade-off between the users’ current harvest and the discounted future productivity of the resource. Given a maximum discount factor, which quantifies the users’ perception of future pay-offs, the temporal dynamics of harvest behavior and ecological resource can be predicted. Our results reveal a non-linear relation between the previous harvest and current discount rates, which is most sensitive around a reference harvest level. While higher than expected returns resulting from cooperative harvesting in the past increase the importance of future resource productivity and foster sustainability, harvests below the reference level lead to a downward spiral of increasing overexploitation and disappointing returns.

Sustainably managing common natural resources, such as fisheries, water, and forests, is essential for our long-term survival. Many analysts have assumed, however, that people will maximize short-term self-benefits—for example, by cutting as much firewood as they can sell—and warned that this behavior will inevitably produce a “tragedy of the commons” ( 1 ), such as a stripped forest that no longer produces wood for anyone. But in laboratory simulations of such social dilemmas, the outcome is not always tragedy. Instead, a basic finding is that humans do not universally maximize short-term self-benefits, and can cooperate to produce shared, long-term benefits ( 2 , 3 ). Similar findings have come from field studies of commonly managed resources ( 6 – 7 ). It has been challenging, however, to directly relate laboratory findings to resource conditions in the field, and identify the conditions that enhance cooperation. On page 961 of this issue, Rustagi et al. ( 8 ) help fill this gap. In an innovative study of Ethiopia's Oromo people, they use economic experiments and forest growth data to show that groups that had a higher proportion of “conditional cooperators” were more likely to invest in forest patrols aimed at enforcing firewood collection rules—and had more productive forests. They also show that other factors, including a group's distance to markets and the quality of its leadership, influenced the success of cooperative management.

The term software agents is ubiquitous nowadays. Of the 50.000 matches when searching the Internet, this article gives a carefully, but subjectively chosen selection of useful Internet sites to begin research with. The websites are categorized along the topics of internet portals, conferences, publications, projects, organizational institutions and downloadable software.