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The present article describes recent developments related to the study of libraries in the field of economics. In terms of scope, there is considerable variation in economic applications, with research themes ranging from cost–benefit analyses to the impacts of libraries on educational outcomes, for example. In terms of approaches, the vast majority of articles in the field correspond to empirical studies employing library data, although there is some variation in terms of aggregation. In general, a first look at this burgeoning literature divides its main contributions into two broad sets: (1) one focused on the long-term effects of public libraries over economic outcomes and (2) another focused on the use of libraries as naturally occurring laboratories for the test of economic theories. Although there is not a common theme underlying the majority of contributions here surveyed, there are still sizable opportunities for economists – and social scientists, in general – who want to explore the research potential of libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on common-pool resources in the last 30 years has hinged on concepts such as rules and property rights for understanding how access and use of natural resources is managed by communities and other actors. However, a small body of literature on mobile pastoralism maintains that resource governance might not always be based on resource-related rules, but instead on negotiation and general norms of reciprocity. Situations conventionally labelled as ‘open access’ might therefore not always be as unregulated and unmanaged as they seem. Here, we examine what the absence of rules for resource access and use means in practice, and how resource users adapt such a governance system to increasing scarcity of pasture land. We conducted interviews, group discussions and participatory mapping exercises in two neighbouring areas, Hamar and Bashada, in the lower Omo area in southern Ethiopia. Both groups are culturally closely related to each other, but showed important differences in their ability and willingness to change their institutions to adapt to resource scarcity. In both Hamar and Bashada, access to grazing was generally non-exclusive. Instead, we found a complex mosaic of ways in which access to grazing was practiced and sanctioned, characterised largely by negotiations and interplay between individual actors rather than by firm rules. Both groups were confronted with increasingly erratic rainfalls and insufficient availability of pasture. Strikingly, while the Bashada had recently established a strictly enforced set-aside area to provide grazing for the end of the dry season, the Hamar rejected such ideas and sought grazing in protected areas, which eventually led to conflict between herders and authorities. Reasons for these diverging strategies might be connected to subtle differences in the degree to which decision-making is individualised and social coordination accepted. These seem to have important implications for community adaptability to changing environmental and societal conditions.

Common-pool resource theory (CPR theory) emerged to understand the limitations of the tragedy of the commons narrative, and the theory of human behavior underlying it. Over time, diverse critiques of CPR theory have also emerged. Prominent critiques include inattention to power and coercion, assumptions that institutions can be crafted, and analyses that exclude history and context, among others. We label this literature critical commons scholarship. In this review paper, we define a typology of five types of critical commons scholarship. The functionalist critique (type 1) argues that a narrow focus on institutions that excludes history, context, and contingencies causes erroneous conclusions about the causes of resource sustainability. The apolitical management critique (type 2) argues that a focus on resource sustainability causes commons scholars to ignore how power is used to create and maintain inequalities through rules and norms structuring resource access. The methodological critique (type 3) argues that methodological incompatibilities, such as CPR theory’s dependence on general, abstract models, necessarily prevent these scholars from responding to type 1 and type 2 critiques. The project of government critique (type 4) argues that common-pool resource theory is used to support neoliberal and hegemonic practices. Finally, the ethical critique (type 5) argues that common-pool resource theory is premised on problematic north-south relationships where expert scholars in the global north provide information to be consumed by “commoners” in the global south. Mainstream CPR theory has been limited in engaging with critical commons scholarship, but there are new tools (such as the social-ecological systems framework and the critical institutionalism approach) for addressing each type of critique. Our goal in developing this typology is to make critiques of CPR theory legible and potentially actionable, while acknowledging the challenges associated with addressing them.

Wetlands provide important ecosystem services to rural communities. However, wetlands are often on communal land, so they may become degraded when individual users act to maximize their personal benefit from ecosystem services without bearing the full environmental costs of their actions. Although it is possible to manage communal resources sustainably, this depends on the dynamics of the socio-ecological system. In this study, we used a structured questionnaire to examine whether demographic characteristics of a rural community and the propensity for partaking in damage-causing activities affected the benefits obtained from the wetlands. Responses from 50 households in the rural Hlabathi administrative area within the Maputo-Albany-Pondoland Biodiversity Hotspot, South Africa, indicated that the entire community obtains some benefits from wetlands; most notably regulating ecosystem services. However, males were more likely to benefit from wetlands, which highlights a potential power imbalance. Respondents were more likely to blame others for wetland degradation, although there was no link between the damage-causing activities and benefits from wetlands. The high dependence on ecosystem services by community members, when combined with gender-based power imbalances and the propensity to blame others, could jeopardize the sustainable use of communal wetlands. Therefore, we describe how strong leadership could nurture a sustainable social–ecological system by integrating ecological information and social empowerment into a multi-level governance system.

The conditions that contribute to institutional robustness of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) regimes are well understood; however, there is much less systematic evidence regarding whether and how CBNRM regimes adapt to changing environments. We address this question by exploring drought adaptation of 37 irrigation associations in northern Spain. For this purpose, we adopt the distinction between "generic" and "specific adaptation institutions" and explore whether and how these institutions combine across different types of irrigation systems. We obtained data from a survey delivered to the 37 associations, governmental records, and interviews with representatives of the associations and public officials. We then used hierarchical cluster analysis to classify the irrigation systems into types, followed by qualitative comparative analysis to explore associations between the adaptation institutions and drought adaptation across the types of systems. According our results, CBNRM regimes adapt to droughts through different combinations of institutions (i.e., different paths to drought adaptation). However, specific adaptation institutions such as water transfers are more relevant during droughts (i.e., to allocate scarcity), whereas generic adaptation institutions such as monitoring and collective choice arrangements play a role both during and in the aftermath of droughts (i.e., to build compliance with and redesign specific adaptation institutions). Also, we did not find an alignment between the two types of institutions and types of irrigation system; however, one type of system (i.e., the "Asian" type) shows a larger number of drought adaptation paths than the other (i.e., the "American" type). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The access to common-pool resources, i.e. to resources in limited common property, are legally distributed in a far more diverse way than limited private property resources. In transportation, a critical case for common-pool resources appear in Green Transport Corridors (GTC), that has been coined by European Union as being «sustainable logistics solutions for cargo transportation' with a shared pool of resources aiming for multimodal trans-shipment routes with a concentration of freight traffic between significant hubs». Although there are already existing implementations of GTC concepts, there are still a lot of open questions concerning GTC governance and ownership models hindering easy marketing of the GTC approach. This paper discusses how and to which extent smart contracts in combination with blockchain technology as innovative solutions are able to facilitate GTC governance and how smart contracts can be applied to provide legal certainty by managing and allocating distributed access to common-pool resources. Smart contracts can be considered as computerised transaction protocols for the execution of underlying legal contracts, and they do not only target reducing transaction costs by realising trackable and irreversible transactions through blockchain technology for distributed databases, but also show high potential to strengthen cooperative business structures and to facilitate the entrepreneurial collaboration of cross-organisational business processes. From a legal perspective, it is controversial whether the use of smart contracts to distribute access to resources in terms of both general common-pool resources. GTCs implies an added value automatically for legal certainty and fair balance among different forms and degrees of access granted to different members of the cooperative. In cases of incorrect performance, change of circumstances or unduly induced contracts smart contracts fall considerably short on the protection of weaker parties, which the paper illustrates at the example of GTCs to be a decisive detriment of the cooperative members. The paper analyses these potentials and risks of smart contracts for the case of GTCs and showcases from both business and legal perspective in terms of their potential as viable means of distributing access to common-pool resources comprising infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Protected areas (PAs) are social-ecological systems (SES) and are contested spaces. The challenges in governing PAs call for a governance system that works with human-nature relations and is capable of adapting to each PA. This necessitates innovative processes and adaptive governance. This paper contributes to the discussion on adaptive governance in SES by offering empirical evidence from Costa Rica on how the processes of social innovation occur in practice. We discuss the evolving governance of the Juan Castro Blanco National Water Park, particularly the contribution of a local association that drives conservation and management of the park. We show that social mobilisation caused social innovation, which was revealed by the achievement of three interconnected process outcomes: satisfaction of interests; effective socio-political arrangements; and empowerment. The socially-innovative governance of the park has contributed to sustainability and to social-ecological change at many levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Ciências da Administração is the property of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Departamento de Ciencias da Administracao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study sought to identify the relevant factors for collective action in the context of the use of common goods and what factors are influential in the cooperation between individuals. For this, an integrative analysis of 267 articles was carried out, published in the Scopus, Science Direct and Web of Science databases. The results show little progress in the inclusion of new analysis factors and the presented factors do not have linear effects on all collective actions, and advances are necessary for a more complete theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Common-pool resource theory (CPR theory) emerged to understand the limitations of the tragedy of the commons narrative, and the theory of human behavior underlying it. Over time, diverse critiques of CPR theory have also emerged. Prominent critiques include inattention to power and coercion, assumptions that institutions can be crafted, and analyses that exclude history and context, among others. We label this literature critical commons scholarship. In this review paper, we define a typology of five types of critical commons scholarship. The functionalist critique (type 1) argues that a narrow focus on institutions that excludes history, context, and contingencies causes erroneous conclusions about the causes of resource sustainability. The apolitical management critique (type 2) argues that a focus on resource sustainability causes commons scholars to ignore how power is used to create and maintain inequalities through rules and norms structuring resource access. The methodological critique (type 3) argues that methodological incompatibilities, such as CPR theory's dependence on general, abstract models, necessarily prevent these scholars from responding to type 1 and type 2 critiques. The project of government critique (type 4) argues that common-pool resource theory is used to support neoliberal and hegemonic practices. Finally, the ethical critique (type 5) argues that commonpool resource theory is premised on problematic north-south relationships where expert scholars in the global north provide information to be consumed by "commoners" in the global south. Mainstream CPR theory has been limited in engaging with critical commons scholarship, but there are new tools (such as the social-ecological systems framework and the critical institutionalism approach) for addressing each type of critique. Our goal in developing this typology is to make critiques of CPR theory legible and potentially actionable, while acknowledging the challenges associated with addressing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional arrangements shape water-related decision making and water policies, and drive behaviours related to water sharing and use. It is therefore crucial that water researchers, policy makers and managers understand institutions. This article reviews and critically assesses the current knowledge of water-related institutional arrangements. It explains how researchers explore institutional structures, emergence and change. It details how institutions are considered as a response to social-environmental issues through design, fit and bricolage. The article concludes with the most promising topics for the future scientific agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Przeglad Sejmowy is the property of Kancelaria Sejmu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

• We study the Tragedy of the Commons, in a context where the commons' capacity is uncertain. • The model is an amended Nash-demand game with an uncertain threshold. • We show that players might collectively be risk-seeking even if each individual is risk averse, whenever the representation of risk is a discrete or multimodal distribution. • This theoretical prediction is corroborated in an experiment: It is only when the likelihood of high capacity goes down enough that individual risk aversion leads most collectives to behave cautiously. • The experiment also reveals a U-shaped relationship between overall coordination over safe or dangerous thresholds and the probability that the commons' capacity is high. The management of natural commons is typically subject to threshold effects. If individuals are risk-averse, some of the recent economic literature holds that uncertainty on the threshold may have a positive impact by lowering incentives to over-consume. The paper shows that, this intuitive result may unravel when uncertainty is modeled as a discrete or multimodal distribution. Using a variant of the Nash demand game with two thresholds, two types of Nash equilibria typically coexist: cautious (respectively, dangerous) equilibria in which agents coordinate on the low threshold (resp. the high threshold). When both types of equilibria coexist, the symmetric dangerous equilibrium is always Pareto dominated by the symmetric cautious equilibrium, and the latter is always Pareto efficient. We use an experimental setting to assess the severity of the coordination and equilibrium selection problem. While cautious (resp. dangerous) play is decreasing (resp. increasing) in the probability that the threshold is high, coordination failures are salient for intermediate probabilities where the likelihood of coexistence of both type of equilibria is high. We find that there is a U-shaped relationship between overall coordination and the probability that the threshold is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rapid urbanization has created large scale of population migration, resulting in many villages being dominated by "left-behind" women, and weak governance of those collectively owned resources. The situation has required these women to take up the functions of decision-making and governance as a remedial mechanism as well as a new path. Based on a case study in a typical hollowing-out village in central China, this paper explores an example of left-behind women's collective action to prevent the over-exploitation of community and resources. It finds out that although traditionally excluded from public activities and marginalized, the "left-behind" women were able to mobilize and enhance collective action. When empowered, they are growing fast with endurance and courage, and as capable as anyone of defending the common-pool resources. It suggests that the left-behind women offer a new governance option for those population hollowing out rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ager: Journal of Depopulation & Rural Development Studies / Revista de Estudios sobre Despoblación y Desarrollo Rural is the property of Rolde de Estudios Aragoneses and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Highlights • We identified, described and analyzed the interaction between two lines of inquiry. • We mapped motivations for researchers to bring together insights from CPR and ES. • General trends observed in the literature are discussed. • We found evidence that insight is brought together for practical reasons and also for conceptual reasons. Abstract Interdisciplinary research is understood to be the preferred way for scientific research to deepen understanding about environmental issues and challenges for sustainability. Two well-defined interdisciplinairy research fields, Ecosystems services (ES) and Common-pool resources (CPR), have taken different approaches that integrate the natural and social sciences to address environmental conundrums collaboratively. Several recent studies bring together insight from each, yet little is known about the breadth or directions, of the interdisciplinary conversation between the two fields of research. Moreover, the potential of this interaction to advance theory and practice relevant for sustainability is underexplored. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by addressing three questions: 1) What are the motives for the interaction between CPR and ES fields? , 2) How are these two fields of research interacting? , and 3) How does the interaction of CPR and ES contribute to research on sustainability? We conducted a systematic map to identify, select, describe and analyse research of our interest. We mapped out motivations for researchers to bring together insights from these two lines of inquiry and examined how they are doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of prosocial preferences is thought to reduce significantly the difficulty of solving societal collective action problems such as providing public goods (or reducing public bads). However, prosociality is often limited to members of an in-group. We present a general theoretical model where society is split into subgroups and people care more about the welfare of others in their own subgroup than they do about those in out-groups. Individual contributions to the public good spill over and benefit members in each group to different degrees. We then consider special cases of our general model under which we can examine the consequences of localized prosociality for the economic outcomes of society as a whole. We ask to what extent prosociality closes the welfare gap between the Nash equilibrium without prosociality and the social optimum. The answer depends on whether private and public inputs are good or poor substitutes in producing final output. Critically, the degree to which this welfare gap closes is a concave function of the level of prosociality in the case of poor substitutes, so even low levels of prosociality can lead to social welfare near the social optimum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costa Rica is supporting Marine Areas of Responsible Fishing (AMPRs) to enable small-scale fishing communities to apply for exclusive harvesting and management rights within spatially delimited areas under a comanagement policy framework. Communities need to self-organize their own fishing association and develop a fishing management plan (POP) to apply. Seven AMPRs have been established in the Gulf of Nicoya, highlighting Costa Rica’s efforts to follow the FAO Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines, but all face collective action challenges to develop and achieve common goals and implementation. In this article, we conduct a qualitative comparative analysis by applying the Social-Ecological System Framework (SESF) as a tool to identify the social and ecological conditions influencing collective action and co-management in three AMPRs in the Gulf of Nicoya, and we compare the similarities and differences between them. Our findings show that all three AMPRs face collective action challenges for different reasons. Nonetheless, some commonalities exist. Common drivers have motivated collective action in the creation of the AMPRs, including the desire to restrict certain types of fishing gears due to perceptions of resource scarcity and high dependence on local resources. Variables such as monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms, strong leadership and the economic heterogeneity of actors positively influence collective action in management. However, there are also variables hindering collective action, such as mistrust among actors, internal conflicts, lack of governmental support and resource unit mobility. Our findings suggest that AMPRs are a promising and potentially effective governance strategy because they can empower marginalized small-scale fishing communities and bring them into national development processes. However, there is an evident need for more state and local community investment into capacity building for self-organization and deliberation processes that can better enable AMPRs to move beyond “paper parks”, and towards being a practically useful governance strategy to showcase Costa Rica’s commitment to FAO Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines. Adapting the AMPR model to fit the social-ecological context of each community is critical for success, despite the perceived similarity between the AMPRs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the study of common-pool resource (CPR) governance, frameworks provide a metatheoretical language to describe system states, dynamics, elements, and relationships. The coding manuals which accompany CPR frameworks– in addition to providing guidelines for connecting empirical case work to conceptual variables–define a vocabulary of coding questions. For empirical work, connecting variables and coding questions with framework elements contributes to conceptual advance. In the process of analysis and publication, it is tempting to offer a novel framework without also developing, applying, or modifying the foundational questions and variables of coding manuals buttressing said frameworks. However, if the scholarly community is to generate robust knowledge for the study of CPR dilemmas, we must provide the underlying work of comparing across frameworks. In this paper, we report on one way the community might conduct such comparisons. We present results and challenges of using a group consensus process to link the more than 450 coding questions derived from the original Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) to the recently proposed Coupled Infrastructure Systems Framework (CISF). Despite overlap, discrepancies in the conceptual positions of the IADF and CISF suggest a need to modify or create new coding variables related to concepts of system boundaries, externalities, cross-scale interactions, multi-functionality, and technological change. We suggest that such work needs provisioning if commons scholars are to navigate the continued challenges of tailoring frameworks and coding manuals to evolving CPR governance dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of higher reliance on irrigation schemes to ensure food security, it is crucial to understand institutional success of water resource management. In addition to other factors explored in great depth by the CPR literature, the actions of long-term appropriators contribute to the success of institutions. However, only a limited amount of work has attempted to examine the actual relationship between length of tenure and institutional success. To examine these relationships, we analyze a long-enduring CPR, the Mwea irrigation scheme (MIS) in Kenya, a network created in the 1950s and whose appropriators have held different lengths of tenure. We explore payment of operation and maintenance (O&M) fees of 71 irrigation units over two consecutive years. We examine 422 household surveys in eight out of the 71 irrigation units on the practice of institutions. We find that length of tenure impacts institutional success by influencing the behaviors of appropriators. Appropriators with longer tenure promote institutional success by provisioning the resource in a more sustainable manner through achieving high payments of O&M fees. Relatively dissatisfied with the implementation of the rules, they use formal and informal means to criticize institutions and to promote institutional change and adaptation. In contrast, appropriators with shorter tenure achieve lower payments of O&M fees, they complain less, and are more satisfied with the existing implementation of the rules. They are satisfied with the status quo. Hence, it is through the pressure of experienced appropriators that institutions such as the MIS evolve and adapt to become more successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on the commons, open access is considered the absence of a property regime and equated with a tragedy of the commons. However, a longitudinal study of mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon shows that open access is not the absence of rules and does not lead to a tragedy of the commons. Current theoretical models cannot explain this phenomenon of management of common-pool grazing resources in a situation of open access. Here I propose a new property regime – an open property regime – that solves this paradox. First, I will explain how open property regimes function as complex adaptive systems using our study of mobile pastoralists in Cameroon. Second, I will describe four other cases of pastoral systems with similar open property regimes. Finally, I discuss the key characteristics that these pastoral systems have in common and outline a new theoretical model of open property regimes.

The Consorzi Vicinali are common property organisations (CPOs) located in a mountain area of Friuli Venezia Giulia region, in North East Italy. These CPOs have a long history of mutual assistance and collective use and management of local resources, thus contributing to a balanced development of the local community and territory. The research aimed at investigating whether these historical CPOs still have a relevant role to play in the development of local rural areas, and how they deal with the present needs and opportunities of these areas. Specifically, the robustness and viability of these organisations were analysed. The survey revealed some strengths and weaknesses of the Consorzi Vicinali. According to Ostrom’s design principles, the robustness is quite high. Nevertheless, this ability to maintain some desired characteristics despite internal and external fluctuations does not always match with a high viability, in terms of natural resource management, internal participation, creation of job opportunities especially for young people, and capacity to attract financial support. In fact, some Consorzi still act effectively in terms of the collective stewardship of rural resources. Whereas, others have the potential to adapt to new challenges and emerging needs, due to the deep rootedness and the sense of belonging of the local community to its territory. These are the strengths of all the Consorzi. The robustness and viability analyses used in a complementary way have been effective here in giving a more comprehensive description of CPOs and their (potential) role in rural development.

The paper contributes to the social-ecological systems literature by adapting and using Elinor Ostrom’s Social-Ecological System (SES) framework in the context of a coastal ecosystem. We modified the SES framework in the case of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta (CGSM), an estuarine lagoon in the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The ecological importance of CGSM and its species is undeniable. This paper aims to understand why collective action for a sustainable use of CGSM’s fishery resources has not taken place. In order to respond to that question, we created new variables within the social, economic, and political settings of the SES framework. The results show that the fishers’ fear of the indiscriminate and strong violence that illegal armed groups have inflicted on them since the 1960s and the economic development in the Colombian Caribbean region help explain the lack of collective action.

This special issue furthers the study of natural resource management from a critical institutional perspective. Critical institutionalism (CI) is a contemporary body of thought that explores how institutions dynamically mediate relationships between people, natural resources and society. It focuses on the complexity of institutions entwined in everyday social life, their historical formation, the interplay between formal and informal, traditional and modern arrangements, and the power relations that animate them. In such perspectives a social justice lens is often used to scrutinise the outcomes of institutional processes. We argue here that critical institutional approaches have potentially much to offer commons scholarship, particularly through the explanatory power of the concept of bricolage for better understanding institutional change. Critical institutional approaches, gathering momentum over the past 15 years or so, have excited considerable interest but the insights generated from different disciplinary perspectives remain insufficiently synthesised. Analyses emphasising complexity can be relatively illegible to policy-makers, a fact which lessens their reach. This special issue therefore aims to synthesise critical institutional ideas and so to lay the foundation for moving beyond the emergent stage to make meaningful academic and policy impact. In bringing together papers here we define and synthesise key themes of critical institutionalism, outline the concept of institutional bricolage and identity some key challenges facing this school of thought.

Abstract Does property rights allocation on the commons affect marriage strategies and fertility? We focus on the role played by patrilineal vs. egalitarian inheritance systems. Our approach combines a theoretical model and an empirical study that exploits an institutional shock at the turn of the 19th century, which made inheritance on the common property-resources egalitarian for everyone. We report that – as predicted by the model – communities with patrilineal inheritance rights on the commons exhibit higher levels of endogamy and consanguinity and lower fertility than those with egalitarian inheritance rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several decades the problem of common goods has been intensively discussed and studied not only by economists, but also by politicians. One particular field of study concerns the problem of social choices realized by collective decisions, or rather individual decisions within some social collective (group). Several analytical models of using common-pool resources are proposed. Most approaches adopted within welfare economics are restricted to the maxim of this part of economics, i.e. to the maximization of the utility function. It was however discovered a long time ago that social interactions may play a significant role. In particular, aversion to inequality can be taken into account as the quantitative manifestation of the human sense of justice. Based on a simple binary choice model it is shown in this paper that by including social interactions into the decisional system of using a common-good resource, it is possible to reveal many stationary states (system multistability). Some of these stationary states may be more, and some others less beneficial from the global point of view. In this paper we investigate the eventual differences introduced by different forms of interactions between individuals. The status of the so-called mean-field approach is also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theoretical models of the commons assert that common-pool resources can only be managed sustainably with clearly defined boundaries around both communities and the resources that they use. In these theoretical models, open access inevitably leads to a tragedy of the commons. However, inmany openaccess systems, use of common-pool resources seems to be sustainable over the long term (i.e., current resource use does not threaten use of common-pool resources for future generations). Here, we outline the conditions that support sustainable resource use in open property regimes. We use the conceptual framework of complex adaptive systems to explain how processes within and couplings between human and natural systems can lead to the emergence of efficient, equitable, and sustainable resource use. We illustrate these dynamics in eight case studies of different social-ecological systems, including mobile pastoralism, marine and freshwater fisheries, swidden agriculture, and desert foraging. Our theoretical framework identifies eight conditions that are critical for the emergence of sustainable use of common-pool resources in open property regimes. In addition, we explain how changes in boundary conditions may push open property regimes to either common property regimes or a tragedy of the commons. Our theoretical model of emergent sustainability helps us to understand the diversity and dynamics of property regimes across a wide range of social-ecological systems and explains the enigma of open access without a tragedy. We recommend that policy interventions in such self-organizing systems should focus on managing the conditions that are critical for the emergence and persistence of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do resource uncertainty and intergroup conflict affect intragroup cooperation over resources in the common pool dilemmas? Does a danger of sudden resource depletion encourage random acts of violence? There are concerns that climate change will escalate conflicts over, and the scarcity of, renewable resources, which are already under threat or in a state of decline. However, we know surprisingly little about the impact of uncertainty on intergroup conflict over resources. In this paper, we present experimental evidence from a mixed design experiment with two-between-group factors: (1) the presence (or absence) of shocks that can destroy a part of resources; and (2) the availability of intergroup conflict. We find that random shocks encourage resource conservation within groups. The positive impact of resource uncertainty on resource conservation disappears in the presence of conflict. It seems that subjects protect themselves from resource exhaustion in the presence of shocks by engaging in conflict and taking resources from the out-group instead of reducing extraction. In general, conflict promotes intragroup cooperation, but this is conditional on the outcomes of past conflicts. In particular, groups harvest more after wins, and only reduce extraction after losing resources in conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Resistance of pathogens and pests to antibiotics and pesticides worldwide is rapidly reaching critical levels. The common‐pool‐resource nature of this problem (i.e. whereby the susceptibility to treatment of target organisms is a shared resource) has been largely overlooked. Using herbicide‐resistant weeds as a model system, we developed a discrete‐time landscape‐scale simulation to investigate how aggregating herbicide management strategies at different spatial scales from individual farms to larger cooperative structures affects the evolution of glyphosate resistance in common waterhemp (Amaranthus tuberculatus). RESULTS: Our findings indicate that high‐efficacy herbicide management strategies practiced at the farm scale are insufficient to slow resistance evolution in A. tuberculatus. When best practices were aggregated at large spatial scales, resistance evolution was hindered; conversely, when poor management practices were aggregated, resistance was exacerbated. Tank mixture‐based strategies were more effective than rotation‐based strategies in most circumstances, while applying glyphosate alone resulted in the poorest outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the importance of landscape‐scale cooperative management for confronting common‐pool‐resource resistance problems in weeds and other analogous systems. © 2018 The Authors. Pest Management Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry. The spread of herbicide resistance traits can be reduced through coordination of weed management decisions at large spatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The possible connections between the physical form of a higher education institution and its effectiveness as a site for teaching, learning, scholarship and research have only become explicit, to some extent, from the mid-twentieth century. This may be thought surprising, not least in view of the large proportion of most institutional budgets devoted to creating and maintaining physical fabric. This lack of consideration is now being rectified from both theoretical and operational perspectives. Space and place -- the latter conceptualised here as what people make of space -- in higher education have come under examination in recent years from philosophical, sociological, pedagogic, architectural, and other perspectives. The conceptual breadth of these perspectives makes it difficult to analyse or to theorise convincingly in a general sense about physical space in higher education -- to a greater extent, arguably, than for other overarching determinants of higher education outcomes. I present here some conclusions drawing on current understandings of the meanings of space and place in higher education; how they are seen as interacting (or not) with academic work; and what directions further work in this area might usefully take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater overexploitation is a worldwide phenomenon with important consequences and as yet few effective solutions. Work on groundwater governance often emphasises the roles of both formal statecentred policies and tools on the one hand, and self-governance and collective action on the other. Yet, empirically grounded work is limited and scattered, making it difficult to identify and characterise key emerging trends. Groundwater policy making is frequently premised on an overestimation of the power of the state, which is often seen as incapable or unwilling to act and constrained by a myriad of logistical, political and legal issues. Actors on the ground either find many ways to circumvent regulations or develop their own bricolage of patched, often uncoordinated, solutions; whereas in other cases corruption and capture occur, for example in water right trading rules, sometimes with the complicity - even bribing - of officials. Failed regulation has a continued impact on the environment and the crowding out of those lacking the financial means to continue the race to the bottom. Groundwater governance systems vary widely according to the situation, from state-centred governance to comanagement and rare instances of community-centred management. The collection of papers in this issue illustrates the diversity of situations, the key role of the state, the political intricacies of achieving sustainability and establishing a mode of governance that can account for the externalities of groundwater overdraft, and the opportunities to establish cooperative arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper measures external effects in a specific type of common-pool resource, an information commons. Employing a novel dataset related to more than 700,000 transactions in distinct libraries during a 10-year period (2006–2015), we estimate the external effects of actions of library users who were subject to a non-monetary sanction (professors and university employees) on users who were subject to a monetary sanction (students). Additionally, we estimate peer effects among users, considering the number of items they borrow from the library. When investigating externalities, we uncover a “crowding-out” effect: for an additional unity in professors and employees' counts, there is an approximate one-to-one decrease in students' counts. In the case of peer effects, we find a positive influence of group behavior on individuals: for every 100 books borrowed by a user's peer group, there is a rise of three books per user, on average. The results reported in this paper have important implications for theories based on common-pool resource management, as well as public goods provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decades, different perspectives have emerged to respond to the challenges related to water management. This paper presents an introduction to the main theoretical approaches that currently are deployed to study water management and governance: new institutionalism, common-pool resources theory, and the empowerment perspective that is related to political ecology. The description of these approaches aims at contextualizing the different contributions presented in this special issue, several of which focus on the analysis of hydrosocial territories. Their main results are briefly summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Centralized organizations can internalize transaction costs and externalities, addressing possible inefficiencies of decentralized management. In practice, however, centralized organizations can have its own inefficiencies and decentralized management can do relatively well. Empirically testing relative efficiency is difficult because distinct organizations emerge endogenously in various contexts. This paper, in contrast, draws upon the unique history of New Mexico, leveraging a natural experiment to assess how the partial transition in the early 20th century from the original small decentralized communal Spanish irrigation systems ( acequias ) to centralized quasi-public irrigation districts altered agricultural development and production. Surface water irrigators in arid regions confront public good issues for building and maintaining shared infrastructure as well as common-pool resource issues to appropriate the surface water. My results confirm that irrigation districts can significantly improve outcomes when investing in costly infrastructure to expand irrigated acreage, increasing farmland values up to 33%. However, I find no broader evidence that the centralized control of water distribution provides any gains to acreage previously under irrigation by the decentralized acequias . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]