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This paper presents novel evidence of no crowding out, of either motivations or donations, among those terminated from an ongoing program of payments for ecosystem services (PES) in Colombia. PES programs have risen in number. However, claims about perverse impacts after programs end could inhibit their growth. PES end for different reasons (planned duration, budget reduction, issues in implementation) and in different ways (some participants or all). An expressed concern for PES is that receiving payments lowers conservation, after PES end, if participants’ intrinsic motivations for conservation are ‘crowded out’ by financial incentives.We test for crowding out by an ongoing program in which some but not all contracts were terminated. We see no evidence of crowding out, since neither the motivations nor the donations for the terminated farmers are significantly different than for non-PES land owners (and this is robust to matching on levels of assets, residence on farm past donation behavior, main economic activity, and participation in collective activities). Our results add evidence from an actual PES to literature questioning the relevance, importance and even sign of crowding effects., JEL: H0, Q28, D91

We study how economic, conflict, and environmental drivers of migration influence immigration acceptance in a receiving country. We carried out an online survey experiment in autumn 2015 with 686 student participants from the University of Innsbruck in Austria. In the survey experiment, respondents state their acceptance for a fictitious migrant from Chad where we vary the following causes of the migration decision: (1) violent conflicts, (2) environmental degradation due to global climate change, (3) environmental degradation due to local overuse, and (4) better economic prospects. We find that respondents support migrants who move because of climate change as much as conflict migrants. Acceptance is lowest for migrants who decide to leave for economic reasons, while it is slightly higher in the case of environmental degradation due to local overuse. Strikingly, a sizable share of respondents (25%) would even reject conflict migrants. Respondents who perceive a negative correlation between welfare, crime rates and job opportunities, and the presence of immigrants display lower immigration acceptance for all motives underlying the migration decision. In addition, we find heterogeneous effects depending on the respondents’ gender and political affiliation. Respondents with right-wing party preferences disclose lower acceptance levels for all causes except conflict. Female respondents are more accepting of climate migrants and less of economic migrants than men. This paper informs the debate around the ongoing political and societal polarization in Europe and elsewhere on the acceptance of different types of migrants.

Conspiracy theories are widespread in the modern information era. Being exposed to conspiracy theories may affect behaviour, for example, by spreading mistrust among people and within organisations...

Victim sensitivity (VS)—a personality trait reflecting the anxious expectation of being exploited—reliably predicts egoistic behavior in interpersonal situations. Here, we look at intragroup situations and investigate whether even one highly victim-sensitive individual can have a detrimental effect of solidarity and cooperativeness on the entire group. Two studies—one field study with community residents from Philippine villages who played a solidarity game (N urn:x-wiley:24750387:media:jts576:jts576-math-0001 800 individuals, 30 villages) and one lab study with participants in a small-group setting (N = 144 individuals, 48 groups) who played a public goods game—show that the highest VS score in a group negatively predicts solidarity and cooperation in the group, especially when external stressors (e.g., a natural disaster and a climate of distrust) are present and group-level resilience factors (e.g., in-group identification and task enjoyment) are absent. These results are relevant for research on the intragroup processes both from a basic as well as from an applied perspective.

Decentralization of water management in Namibia follows a community-based co-management approach, emphasizing the inclusion of women in local leadership. Building on a random sample of 32 water point chairpersons, 17 female and 15 male, and 384 villagers in rural northern Namibia, we document that women are equally represented as chairpersons and that they are significantly more educated and younger than their male counterparts. However, most of the female leaders come from the family of the traditional leader. We then show that opinions about the role of a leader (such as the belief that ‘men make better leaders’ or ‘it is sometimes acceptable to take a bribe’) do not differ between male and female leaders. However, their opinions differ significantly from those of the average villager. Thus, our assessment reveals that although men and women are equally represented in numbers, it has not necessarily led to the adoption of new ideas about and conceptions of leadership and gender roles in practice so far. We discuss how some aspects of the democratic blueprint are accepted while others are rejected, adapted, or transformed to fit local specificities.

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.

We report some preliminary evidence on the spread of anti-Western conspiracy thinking in Russia and China as well as on whether it correlates with decisions made in nonpolitical settings. We conduct a survey of students at two universities in Moscow and Beijing, as well as an implement experimental game in which participants make costly decisions as to whether they expect (pairs of) other participants to collude against them. Anti-Western conspiracy thinking is widespread in both countries. However, only in China, but not in Russia, does the belief in Western conspiracies correlate with lower levels of expectation of collusion.

We use a framed field experiment to assess resource harvesting behavior and its interaction with prosocial and antisocial punishment in the Kavango woodland savannah of Namibia. We impleme...

Democratic leaders perform similarly to traditional leaders in procedural fairness and nepotism., This study tests the common conception that democratically elected leaders behave in the interest of their constituents more than traditional chiefs do. Our sample includes 64 village leaders and 384 villagers in rural Namibia, where democratically elected leaders and traditional chiefs coexist. We analyze two main attributes of local political leaders: procedural fairness preferences and preferential treatment of relatives (nepotism). We also measure personality traits and social preferences, and conduct standardized surveys on local governance practices and villagers’ perceptions of their leaders’ performance. Our results indicate that traditional chiefs are as likely to implement fair, democratic decision-making procedures, and are as unlikely to be nepotistic. Moreover, elected leaders and chiefs express similar social preferences and personality traits. These findings align with villagers’ perceptions of most leaders in our sample as being popular and fair, and villagers’ responses reveal a discrepancy between planned and de facto implementation of democratic institutions.

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.

Plastic pollution is rampant in oceans across the globe. Our project in Indonesia seeks to understand and measure the effectiveness of non-monetary interventions that can help to reduce plastic bag consumption. A natural field experiment with 60 local shops was set up and three different persuasion strategies to measure shop owners’ likelihood to participate and sell them to customers were applied. In all treatment conditions the reusable bags were offered to the shop owners at a subsidized price along with explanations about the harm plastic bags do to the environment. Additionally and according to their randomly assigned treatment, they got either information activating a pro-environmental social norm (arguing that distributing the reusable bags helps support the wellbeing of their society); Indirect monetary incentive (arguing that their business can save money by reducing the amount of free plastic bags) or; authority endorsements (the head of the village showing his support of the idea to distribute the reusable bags). Our results support the conjecture that local leaders play an important role in the Indonesian context.

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.

Using samples of both students and workers in China and comparing democratic decision making (i.e. being able to choose one's rules) to non-democratic decision making (i.e. exogenously imposed rule), we show that Chinese participants cooperate the most in a public goods game under the stylized authoritarian environment. This finding may be surprising in light of previous evidence for a “democracy premium” but is in line with authoritarian norms which are prominent in China. We further show that there is a systematic association between participants’ values and their relative contribution decisions in exogenous and endogenous implementation of the rule. Our major finding is that those subjects that place greater value on accepting authority are responsible for greater levels of cooperation under top-down governance. Our findings provide evidence that the effectiveness of a political institution depends on its congruence with individual values and societal norms.

Climate change is projected to increase the number of extreme weather events, which may lead to cascading impacts, feedbacks, and tipping points not only in the biophysical system but also in the social system. To better understand societal resilience in risky environments, we analyzed people’s attachment to place, their willingness to take risks, and how these change in response to extreme weather events. We conducted a survey with 624 respondents at the forefront of climate change in Asia: the river deltas in Bangladesh and Vietnam. Our findings confirm that most people prefer staying. Yet crucially, we find that (i) self-reported experiences of climate-related hazards are associated with increased risk aversion and place attachment, reinforcing people’s preferences to stay in hazardous environments; (ii) people with experiences of hazards are more likely aspiring to move to high-income destinations, arguably being beyond the reach of their capacities; and (iii) changes in aspirations to move abroad are connected to the changes in risk aversion and place attachment. The fact that preferences are associated with cumulative experiences of hazards and interact with aspirations to move to high-income destinations may contribute to our understanding of why so many people stay in hazardous environments.

The authors use dynamic lab-in-the-field common pool resource experiments to investigate the role of two forms of democracy on the cooperation of forest users in Ethiopia. In this experimental setup, participants can either directly select a rule (direct democracy) or elect a leader who decides on the introduction of rules (representative democracy). These two treatments are compared with the imposition of rules and imposition of leaders. It is found that both endogenous leaders elected by the community members and endogenous rules selected by the direct involvement of the participants are more effective in promoting cooperation among the community members compared to exogenous leadership, exogenous rule imposition and the baseline scenario without any of these modifications. However, no significant difference is found between representative democracy in the election of leadership and direct democracy in the selection of rules. Leadership characteristics and behavior are further analyzed. The results underline the importance of democratic procedures.

Women have typically been excluded from forest conservation programs due to traditional decision-making structures in their villages and local governments. Research now shows that greater representation of women in forest-user groups leads to more equitable sharing of program benefits and increases conservation outcomes.

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.

We study the effect of resource scarcity on human behavior using dynamic lab-in-the-field experiments which are framed around the extraction of trees from a communally managed forest in Ethiopia. Subjects who faced resource scarcity were less cooperative than those who faced more abundant commons condition. When initial condition of the commons was relatively abundant it seemed more likely that resource users established a norm of reciprocity. We further found that especially men overharvested under resource scarcity which is in line with studies that had found men to be more competitive. We also tested different policies. We found that gaining legitimacy through election increases cooperation independent of whether the resource is scarce or abundant. When sanctions were imposed we observed a crowding-out effect of intrinsic motivation to cooperate under resource abundance. With resource scarcity imposed sanctions did not lead to a crowding-out effect but democratic elections were by far more effective.

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.

In many situations across biology and economics, there is often one individual, or “agent,” that invests effort into a beneficial task and also one individual that, in contrast, foregoes the effort of investing, and instead simply exploits the efforts of another. What makes an individual choose to invest in production versus exploiting the efforts of another? If everyone invests, then exploitative strategies become very profitable; however if everyone is exploitative, there will be no investments to exploit. How does natural selection resolve this dilemma? What can economic institutions do to encourage investment? Can biologists and economists learn from the approach of each other’s discipline? This chapter outlines the commonalities and differences in approach of the two disciplines to the general problem of investment versus exploitation. It develops a model to encapsulate the general features of many scenarios (“games”) involving potential exploitation and explores the benefits of a unified approach, outlining current limitations and important areas for future investigation.

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.

This paper examines whether exposure to persistent resource scarcity on the commons affects pastoralists' readiness to engage in antisocial behavior towards their fellow commons users. The region under study is divided into two areas according to exogenous variations in biomass production stemming from geological peculiarities. We conducted a joy-of-destruction game with pastoralists from both areas and provide evidence for a positive relationship between antisocial behavior and long-term exposure to scarcity. Antisocial behavior among villagers occurs twice as often in an area where resources are scarcer and competitive pressure is higher. Our results remain robust to the inclusion of various controls, including beliefs, socio-demographics, absolute and relative income, and within-group inequality. If one interprets decreasing another participant's payoff below one's own as a tendency towards conflict behavior, our results suggest a higher risk of conflict among resource users in areas of greater scarcity.

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.

We examine the effectiveness of three democratically chosen rules that alleviate the coordination and cooperation problems inherent in collectively managed common-pool resources. In particular we investigate how rule effectiveness and rule compliance depend on the prevailing local norms and ecological values held by resource users. For this purpose, we employ a framed field experiment that is based on a rangeland model for semi-arid regions and carried out with communal farmers in Namibia and South Africa. Participants could vote for three ‘best practice’ management rules found in many places around the world that are discussed for implementation in the study area: (temporary) private property rights, rotational grazing or limitation of livestock numbers. All rules were designed in a way that facilitated cooperation or coordination of actions. The focus of this study lies on the interactions between these rules and prevalent ecological norms exhibited in the rounds prior to rule implementation. In contrast to previous lab experimental studies, we find that democratic voting of rules is not sufficient for high rule compliance and an overall enhancement in cooperation. Rules turned out to be inefficient if they were in conflict with the prevalent ecological norm.

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.

Economic experiments carried out in the computer laboratory seldom account for broader real-world contextual variables that affect humans as learning and norm-adopting individuals. The here presented ‘within-culture across-country’ design of a standard trust experiment reveals an interesting phenomenon which most probably is related to the context that people live in: South African communities expressed extremely low trust while participants from Namibia exhibited high trust, but low reciprocity, although both share the same ethnic background. The country effect between the two regions remained large even after using a matching estimator to substantiate that these differences were not driven by sample selection bias. Qualitative evidence from the study area suggests that corrupt local institutions have led to lower trust in South African communities while participants in Namibia seemingly applied a deep-rooted behavioural norm of the Nama society which they perceived to be appropriate for the exchange in the experiment.

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.

Context affects decision-making in many ways. In this paper we explore differences in cooperation behaviour between communal farmers in Namibia and South Africa, who share the same ethnic origin but have had different historical and ecological constraints. We report on a series of field experiments based on a common-pool resource model. Our experimental design is framed according to the grazing situation in semi-arid rangelands. Dependent on the behaviour in previous rounds, participants are facing different states of resource availability with varying need to cooperate, coordinate and to be patient. While only 4% of the grazing areas in South Africa remain in good quality, Namibians achieve a level of 42%. We analyse the different experimental states and find that Namibians behave in all states more cooperatively. We argue that the large difference between the two regions is due to a combination of different historical developments and ecological preconditions: Namibian resource users have a longer experience in cooperative resource management and intact traditional norms. Moreover, the real-life payoffs to cooperation are higher in Namibia stemming from ecological factors.