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Nations in the Global South have increasingly embraced large hydropower. Hydropower development typically involves the displacement and resettlement of entire communities and has a range of social and ecological impacts. Some communities become the operational center for the dam construction, as well as host new neighborhoods of resettlers. One of the less-studied impacts of dams is the potential loss of social capital both in resettled and host communities. Here, we ask how the Belo Monte dam in the Amazon is associated with social capital in a resettled group and a non-resettled population that, while not experiencing resettlement, nevertheless was impacted by the dam as well. We use measures of cognitive and structural social capital. Results suggest that resettlers have lower structural social capital across two proxy indicators, whereas the host community has lower cognitive social capital. Future research and social impact assessments should pay more attention to how hydropower impacts both kinds of social capital.

Purpose In developing countries, local buyers often rely on relational contracting based on reciprocity and trust. This paper analyzes relational contracting and global value chain (GVC) governance by focusing on how domestic and foreign coffee exporters in Rwanda confront challenges.Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 representatives of Rwandan private, Rwandan cooperative-owned and foreign exporters, and four coffee sector stakeholders.Findings Foreign firms export most Rwandan coffee, and local exporters express concerns about their ability to compete. Rwandan exporters face challenges accessing capital, competing with foreign firms and managing high transaction costs. They use relational contracts to reduce transaction costs, and they benefit from a monopsony zoning regulation that reduces competition. Foreign exporters face regulatory challenges: a government-set coffee price and the zoning regulation. They vertically integrate to reduce costs and lock in suppliers through prefinancing.Research limitations/implications Future research should analyze differences between local and foreign exporters in other contexts to advance understanding of the different challenges faced and contracting approaches used.Originality/value Few GVC governance studies address the role of relational contracts in contexts where enforcement is costly. Considering relational contracts within GVCs can improve value chain analysis, specifically in the developing countries where many GVCs start.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M The construction of hydroelectric dams in the Global South and emerging economies is controversial; on one hand, advocates highlight the positive impacts at national and global scales, such as national development and independence from fossil fuels. On the other hand, opponents of dams stress the negative social-ecological impacts on the livelihoods of communities near construction sites, and the lack of local communities participation in the decision making processes. Scholars have published a range of case studies exploring the impacts of dams. However, there is no comprehensive understanding of how hydroelectric dams impact people's livelihoods and capital globally. In this study, we present a comparative medium-N survey exploring the impacts of 33 large-scale dams on people's natural, social, human, financial, and physical capital and the pathways of conditions that explain the changes in these capital in the Global South. To do so, we used the information from a qualitative meta-analysis of the social impacts of dams and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Our results show that the types of people's capital are impacted differently by the construction: natural, social, human, and financial capital are negatively impacted, whereas physical capital is often positively impacted. The fsQCA showed three main groups of pathways that explain the changes in capital. First, the study indicates that lack of local communities participation in decision-making processes negatively impacts all capital but physical. Second, regardless of the nation's energy security, megadams generate primarily negative impacts on natural, social, and human capital and positive impacts on physical capital. Third, our results indicate the importance of the World Commission on Dams in raising international awareness about the social-ecological impacts of dams despite a country's energy-security status.

While there have been efforts to supply off-grid energy in the Amazon, these attempts have focused on low upfront costs and deployment rates. These “get-energy-quick” methods have almost solely adopted diesel generators, ignoring the environmental and social risks associated with the known noise and pollution of combustion engines. Alternatively, it is recommended, herein, to supply off-grid needs with renewable, distributed microgrids comprised of photovoltaics (PV) and in-stream generators (ISG). Utilization of a hybrid combination of renewable generators can provide an energetically, environmentally, and financially feasible alternative to typical electrification methods, depending on available solar irradiation and riverine characteristics, that with community engagement allows for a participatory codesign process that takes into consideration people’s needs. A convergent solution development framework that includes designers—a team of social scientists, engineers, and communication specialists—and communities as well as the local industry is examined here, by which the future negative impacts at the human–machine–environment nexus can be minimized by iterative, continuous interaction between these key actors.

PurposeThis study aims to improve our understanding of side selling in farmer cooperatives. Cooperative member side selling, in which farmers divert produce from cooperatives to competitors, threatens coffee cooperatives. This is a problem in Burundi, where many households earn income from coffee and cooperatives serve a collective action function.Design/methodology/approachUsing data from a survey of Burundian coffee farmers, we assess the determinants of two types of cooperative member side-selling behavior: selling to both cooperative and non-cooperative buyers and selling solely to non-cooperative buyers.FindingsFarmers who sell to both cooperative and non-cooperative buyers are more likely to be male household heads, be more invested in coffee and have larger farms than non-side sellers, among other characteristics. Farmers who only sell to non-cooperative buyers are poorer and less invested in coffee than non-side sellers.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional research is needed to better understand why side-selling behavior differs between groups and to better understand how household head gender influences side selling. In addition, this study lacks qualitative data supporting quantitative findings. Future research should include qualitative methods to better understand motivations for side-selling behavior.Originality/valueThe study provides important information on what influences cooperative member side selling and focuses on specific types of side-selling behavior that have been largely overlooked. The study focuses on the role of household head gender in side selling, which is important, given the centrality of women to African agriculture.

In southern Africa the repeated cultivation of maize (Zea mays) and climate variability (especially frequent and extended droughts) have created conditions favouring parasitic weed infestation (e.g., Striga asiatica). In the past decade, Striga has reduced maize yields for smallholder farmers (cultivating less than two hectares), not only in southern Africa, but across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Parasitism of maize by Striga leads to significant grain yield losses. Intercropping legumes within maize-based systems has been shown to decrease Striga infestation and improve food security. Before cultivating these cropping systems, farmers consider different attributes associated with them (e.g., efforts or cost of inputs). Understanding farmers’ preferences for these attributes generates insights as how to increase adoption of intercropping as a Striga control practice. We use discrete choice experiments to identify the trade-offs which Malawian farmers are willing to accept among the attributes of choice scenarios for Striga control practices. Results indicate that farmers are willing (and in some cases unwilling) to sacrifice different fractions of maize yield for suppression of Striga, labour intensity, soil fertility and intercropped legume yield. Male and female farmers have heterogeneous preferences for these attributes. These findings have significant implications for Striga management and its effect on a crop that sustains the livelihoods of more than 80% of Malawians.

This study uses data from 1,024 coffee producing households to address two critical questions regarding the role of cooperatives in Rwanda’s coffee sector: Does cooperative membership increase adoption of best practices and coffee productivity? and do cooperatives improve farm household welfare? Using a propensity score matching technique to account for selection bias, we find that cooperatives are a critical institution for building farmer capacity, promoting adoption of improved technologies and inputs, and increasing productivity. We discuss the role that cooperatives can play in increasing farmer welfare and reestablishing the coffee sector as a pillar of growth in the country.

Significance North American and European countries built many large dams until 1975, after which both started to abandon a significant part of their installed hydropower because of the negative social and environmental impacts. However, there has been a recent trend of new large hydropower dams being built in developing countries, particularly in megabiodiversity river basins, such as the Amazon, the Congo, and the Mekong. The socioeconomic and environmental damages in these river systems are even greater than the early costs in North America and Europe. This paper discusses how the hydropower sector needs to not only focus on energy production but also, include the negative social and environmental externalities caused by dams and recognize the unsustainability of current common practices., Hydropower has been the leading source of renewable energy across the world, accounting for up to 71% of this supply as of 2016. This capacity was built up in North America and Europe between 1920 and 1970 when thousands of dams were built. Big dams stopped being built in developed nations, because the best sites for dams were already developed and environmental and social concerns made the costs unacceptable. Nowadays, more dams are being removed in North America and Europe than are being built. The hydropower industry moved to building dams in the developing world and since the 1970s, began to build even larger hydropower dams along the Mekong River Basin, the Amazon River Basin, and the Congo River Basin. The same problems are being repeated: disrupting river ecology, deforestation, losing aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity, releasing substantial greenhouse gases, displacing thousands of people, and altering people’s livelihoods plus affecting the food systems, water quality, and agriculture near them. This paper studies the proliferation of large dams in developing countries and the importance of incorporating climate change into considerations of whether to build a dam along with some of the governance and compensation challenges. We also examine the overestimation of benefits and underestimation of costs along with changes that are needed to address the legitimate social and environmental concerns of people living in areas where dams are planned. Finally, we propose innovative solutions that can move hydropower toward sustainable practices together with solar, wind, and other renewable sources.

The Belo Monte Hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River in the Brazilian Amazon will be the third largest dam in the world in power generating capacity (11 GW). Its construction has brought negative socioeconomic and environmental impacts for local fishers that far outweigh the benefits. We used a qualitative case study approach to explore perceptions among fishers in a community downstream from the dam of the impact of Belo Monte on their livelihoods and their fisheries. We found that fishers, who, although they were not displaced were neither consulted nor compensated, have been severely impacted by the dam, and that fishermen and fisherwomen are differentially affected. More attention needs to be given to downstream communities and the impacts they experience.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a popular strategy for environmental protection, and tropical forest conservation in particular. Little is known, however, about their effectiveness. Many argue that even if PES increase conservation while payments last, they may adversely affect other motivations for pro-environmental behaviour in the longer term. We test whether conditional payments also encourage forest users to conserve shared forest resources after payments end. Using a framed field experiment with 1,200 tropical forest users in five countries, we show that (1) during the intervention, conditional payments increased conservation behaviour; (2) after payments stopped, users continued to conserve more on average than they did before the intervention, especially when they were able to communicate with each other; and (3) trust amplified the lasting conservation effects of the interventions. PES effectiveness may increase when interventions facilitate interpersonal communication and when implemented in contexts where forest users enjoy high levels of trust. A framed field experiment in five countries shows that Payments for Ecosystem Services increase forest conservation, that communication contributes to payment effectiveness and that positive effects outlast payments.

Increased community cooperation is an important objective of Community-Driven Reconstruction (CDR) programs in post-conflict settings. While these programs typically work with a limited group of beneficiaries, little is known about the potential community impact beyond these beneficiaries. To investigate this, we empirically analyze how cooperative behavior develops in a lab-in-the-field experiment with mixed groups of CDR program beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries, organized in 42 municipalities in Colombia with active CDR programs. In the experiment, we use two rounds of a binary public goods game with a communication stage between both rounds. The experimental data are complemented with information on pre-existing social proximity among the participants and whether they have participated in a CDR program. We find that cooperation increases after communication, and that it correlates positively with the proportion of cooperators before communication. This peer effect is mainly driven by the cooperative behavior of CDR program beneficiaries while the influence of non-beneficiaries is limited.

Construction of large-scale hydroelectric dams has increased in recent decades in the Global South and emerging economies. Population resettlement is one of the most severe socioeconomic impacts caused by dam construction. Processes aiming to mitigate its impacts and restore livelihoods are often described as inadequate. The resettlement process’ ineffectiveness could be explained by persistent deficiency in citizen participation, which is also a sign of the impacted population not being able to participate in the process affecting their lives. Our research presents a medium-N comparative study showing the pathways explaining deficiency of participation across 23 large-scale hydroelectric dams in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We conducted a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis based on information from a qualitative meta-analysis and secondary sources. Our results suggest that there are at least two scenarios to explain deficiency in participation. The first scenario includes dams constructed during autocracies, mostly before the release of the World Commission on Dams guidelines. The second scenario involves the largest dams in our analysis, with high economic and political interests at stake built under both autocratic and democratic regimes, despite the presence of what we categorized as effective forms of public opposition to the project and resettlement process. We discuss features that make large hydroelectric dams less participatory or inherently undemocratic in the Global South.

Efforts to slow down and eventually reverse the trend of climate change will take time, and in some cases, the negative impacts of climate change will be felt long before long-term solutions to this problem can bear fruit. Adaptation and mitigation strategies constitute the front line of attack for rural households in developing countries that rely on agricultural production and natural resource use as their main source of income and growth, and whose livelihoods are threatened by climate change. This study models the determinants of adoption of sustainable production practices by coffee producers in the department of Matagalpa, in northern Nicaragua. Using primary survey data, we analyze the extent to which cooperative membership impacts adoption of ten different practices. We find that coffee farmers who belong to cooperatives have adopted sustainable practices at higher rates than non-members, and that the odds of adoption are higher for members than for non-members. A factor analysis was conducted to determine the underlying structural differences between the ten practices, and from this analysis three factors emerged and were modeled. We find that cooperative membership is a significant determinant of practices that promote water conservation, yet not significant for practices that promote soil and plant health, nor for practices related to field management. These findings are valuable for policy makers, donors, and development and extension practitioners in the coffee sector, as they can better inform and guide policies toward more efficient and effective paths of long-term climate change adaptation.

Community geographic features change over time, and this change can be contentious. Understanding social responses to this change is important for policies related to adaptation to climate change. This paper examines the use of participatory mapping of resources, at two time points, in a Tanzanian community. The results of our mapping (May 2015) were compared to those by a report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (2009). Differences included boundaries, land use designations and accessibility. These discrepancies may reflect actual changes in resources and livelihoods over time, but also differences in researcher trust and the enabling of participants. Findings suggest that repeated participatory maps, conducted in a trusting environment, are required for long-term planning in places experiencing both climate and social change.

In this article, we use a new game‐based tool to evaluate the immediate and longer term behavioral change potential of three different payments for ecosystem services (PES) delivery mechanisms: direct payments for individual performance, direct payments for group performance, and insurance. Results from four rural shifting‐cultivation dependent communities in Lao PDR suggest that easily understood group‐oriented incentives yield the greatest immediate resource‐use reduction and experience less free‐riding. Group‐based incentives may succeed because they motivate participants to communicate about strategies and coordinate their actions and are perceived as fair. No incentive had a lasting effect after it ceased, but neither did any crowd out the participants’ baseline behavior. Temporary reductions in resource dependence may provide a buffer for development of new livelihoods and longer term change. Games like the one developed here can help policy makers appropriately target environmental incentive programs to local contexts and teach program participants how incentive schemes work.

Promoting alternative livelihoods that do not depend on exploiting biodiversity is a common approach to encourage proconservation attitudes and behaviors among people around protected areas in developing countries. To what extent do participants in alternative livelihoods programs understand the intended connection to conservation objectives? This often‐overlooked question is important for understanding program effectiveness. We use exploratory qualitative research to investigate this question in the buffer zone around Nepal's Bardia National Park. We also examine participants' attitudes and behaviors toward conservation. Overall, we find low awareness of the program's conservation objectives. People participating in alternative livelihood activities with a direct connection to conservation, for example, employment in the tourism industry, developing alternative energy that substitutes for biomass from the park, and efforts to limit human‐wildlife conflict, are more likely to understand and appreciate the connection to conservation than those receiving alternative livelihood options unrelated to conservation, for example sewing and tailoring. Their attitudes and behavior towards conservation follow similar patterns. Our findings call for conservation programs to establish systems to monitor participants' understanding of their conservation objectives and how this connects to their attitudes and behaviors towards conservation.

This paper analyzes motivations for coffee roasters to source directly from farmers and how roasters decide whether to use the Direct Trade sustainability label. Direct Trade is an uncertified label connoting an approach wherein roasters negotiate coffee price and quality with farmers without intermediaries, with purported farmer income benefits. We examine semi-structured interviews with 11 US roasters and three coffee stakeholders to identify motivations to source directly, provide customers sourcing information, and use or reject the Direct Trade label. We find that roasters directly source coffee primarily for quality reasons and communicate about sourcing because they believe customers would value coffee more if they understood their sustainable sourcing practices. However, the lack of a clear definition for the Direct Trade label, coffee roaster concerns about the label&rsquo, s utility, and the threat of &ldquo, free riders&rdquo, disincentivizes label use. Without a shared label, customers face high costs for information about directly sourced coffee, which may limit the expansion of a sourcing practice that could benefit farmers.

Wicked socio-ecological problems are inherently complex and require an interdisciplinary approach for mitigation. Here, we investigated the many drivers of human-lion conflict in East Africa and present a novel conceptual model illustrating the intricate interactions within and between the five main dimensions of conflict. We highlight the importance of broadening research efforts to include these multiple dimensions at all stages of the research process as well as to incorporate higher levels of diversity into research teams. We offer examples and recommendations on how to approach human-lion conflict from a more interdisciplinary perspective. However, challenges exist and will continue to arise as diverse interdisciplinary teams form. We address several main barriers to interdisciplinarity and encourage researchers and institutions to support a team science approach to solving wicked problems like human-lion conflict.

Nations in the Global South have turned to massive hydropower projects to provide for the energy needs of their growing economies. Large-scale hydropower projects cause untold environmental damage to river ecosystems, to fish biodiversity, and displace millions of people globally. Much research documents these impacts, yet we do not know if these populations support the development of hydropower. In this paper, we aim to understand how direct experiences with resettlement might influence the support or opposition to hydropower development considering energy justice, particularly the restorative and procedural tenets, as a motivating framework. Our research is based on social survey data from a population resettled during the construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Brazillian Amazon. Results from partial proportional odds models suggest that a slim majority feel that hydropower is worth the cost, yet even this support declines as perceived impacts increase. These populations hold nuanced views and are not uniformly negative about dams, regretting the negative outcomes for them but believing the government discourse that the energy needs of the country may require them to sacrifice for the larger good. Support for hydropower as well as energy injustices might vary considerably across communities that are impacted differentially by Belo Monte.

This experimental study examines behavior in a linear public goods game with an appropriation frame where we vary the value of individual benefits and the group losses from appropriation. Parallel to the literature on public goods provision, individual appropriation decreases with the marginal damage to the group that occurs through appropriation and increases in the private benefit from appropriation. In addition, we examine a novel set of decision situations where individual benefits and group damages change proportionately, as to hold the marginal per capita return constant. Individual responses to these proportionate changes are heterogeneous but on average, appropriation levels do not change significantly. These results are robust to two experimental designs, a one-shot menu-design where subjects make multiple choices and a complementary set of sessions where participants make a single decision in a one-shot game.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her contributions to the governance of commonly owned resources. She was the founder of the International Forestry Resources and Institutions program (IFRI), and the co-founder of the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC), and the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, all of which provided lively arenas in which natural and social scientists from diverse disciplines collaborated. Forests and their transformations as well as ways to conserve them to serve people's needs was one of the urgent research topics Elinor Ostrom investigated. Her contributions were significant for forest management and conservation and informed her work on the commons and institutional diversity. Lessons from these Ostrom-led efforts proved that self-governance was possible but that it depended on multiple factors. In her work with economic experiments, Ostrom was able to replicate important findings that gave support to case studies from IFRI and CIPEC. She showed that panaceas did not exist for resource management challenges. Ostrom's work showed the value of building multinational, multidisciplinary, and comparative research bridging the social and natural sciences and the complexity of governance systems. These multiple layers and complexity are reflected in her Socio-Ecological Systems framework (SES).

Human-environment research in the 21st century will need to change in major ways. It will need to integrate the natural and the social sciences; it will need to engage stakeholders and citizens in the design of research and in the delivery of science for the benefit of society; it will need to address ethical and democratic goals; and it will need to address a myriad of important theoretical and methodological challenges that continue to impede progress in the advance of sustainability science.

This article presents the results from framed field economic experiments in rural Colombia that aim to explore the behavioral responses of resource users to exogenous changes in the availability of a common-pool resource. In the first 10 rounds of the experiment, all subjects played at a baseline with the same initial resource availability. In the subsequent rounds, the experimenters exogenously changed the resource size, including mild and strong reductions in the resource size and rebounds to original size. Results show that subjects react to strong reductions in resource availability, by increasing appropriation from the resource. This behavior holds for intense and persistent as well as for progressive reductions in resource availability. In addition, subjects that experience a reduction in the resource availability followed by a rebound to the initial resource size appropriate more than those subjects who did not experience any change in the resource availability.

This experimental study examines variations in the opportunity cost of conservation in two linear appropriation games that include symmetric and asymmetric subject payoffs. In the first game, appropriation leads to deterministic degradation in the value of a shared resource. In the second game, appropriation leads to both deterministic and probabilistic degradation, introducing endogenous uncertainty in the value of the opportunity cost of conserving the shared resource. The results show that subjects systematically decrease appropriation the lower the opportunity cost of conservation, and the addition of probabilistic degradation leads to further decreases in group appropriation. As conjectured, the response of individual subjects to the addition of probabilistic degradation is conditional on their expected marginal net benefits to appropriate, which depend in turn on their first order beliefs of others’ appropriation. The overall decreases in appropriation due to probabilistic degradation, however, are not large enough to offset decreases in expected efficiency due to expected losses in the value of the shared resource.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that determine individual compliance with a locally devised set of rules for harvesting and selling marine turtle eggs, as well as for protecting the turtles and their hatchlings. Individuals who violate the rules receive a monetary penalty, which implies a reduction in the income from sale of eggs. While some individuals do not have income reductions due to infractions, others have reductions of up to 40% of the total income. Using written records of deductions due to sanctions between May 2008 and May 2010 and information from a survey of 108 local turtle egg harvesters, the paper presents the results of econometric analyses of factors that influence the amount of fines received by individuals. The results suggest that individual dependence on the income from sale of eggs, perceptions of rules and their legitimacy, and demographic factors such as age and gender are all important factors explaining rule breaking behavior. The findings also highlight new threats to the long-term survival of local institutions responsible for protection of marine turtles and their sustainable consumptive use.

This paper presents the results of a modified dictator game where donors are tourists in the island of Majorca, Spain, and the recipient is an environmental foundation. In this experiment we explore if the level of voluntary donations varies under different treatments that include taxes (high and low levels) and voting treatments on choosing and obligatory imposition of taxes (high vs. low and low vs. no tax). Our results show that participants only self-impose mandatory contributions when they must choose between a high or low tax, and rarely passing the high tax. In addition, we find that those individuals who voted for a high tax and are in a group where the majority votes for the low tax conform to their earlier vote by contributing more. Further, our data supports an incomplete crowding-out of voluntary donations by the application of tourism taxes ear-marked for environmental purposes. From a policy perspective, this result supports the potential for a complementary use of taxes and voluntary donations for fundraising environmental projects in tourism destinations.

"We investigate the ecological impact caused by fishing grounds and the fishing gear/methods used by fishers in Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta (CGSM), an estuarine lagoon located on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. To do so, we build individual and composite ecological sustainable indicators based on the opinions of a group of experienced fishers and a group of scientists. Additionally, we use those indicators to examine the influence of socioeconomic and perceptional factors on fishers’ fishing behaviors and how those behaviors may be affecting CGSM fishery resources. Our results suggest that fishers and scientists differ in their opinions about the impact of fishing on CGSM. Additionally, we found that having a higher level of education, sharing household expenses with other family members and spending more hours fishing lead to ecologically-sustainable fishing behavior, while the perception that the government is responsible for CGSM conservation leads to ecologically unsustainable fishing behavior."

Compost micro-entrepreneurship has been used as strategy to increase the incomes of poor and rural farming communities. Nevertheless, several difficulties can arise to sustain these small businesses. The conversion of organic material into compost requires labor, tools and infrastructure. Many poor and rural microenterprises cannot afford all of these inputs to sustain operations. Literature suggests that social capital and collective action can address challenges related to limited resources for communities and small businesses. Little research, however, has explored how coworker characteristics and their cooperative efforts affect the financial sustainability of compost micro-enterprises. The objective of this study was to unveil whether rural compost microenterprises use social capital and/or collective action to address various challenges related to natural and financial capital, and if so, in what manner. A multisite case study framework was implemented using participant observation to identify common challenges faced by compost microenterprises in Chimaltenanago, Guatemala. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted to determine if coworker characteristics (related to social capital) addressed these challenges, and if so, how. Four characteristics related to social capital emerged from a thematic analysis, including 1) raw material access based on coworker occupation, 2) overhead savings from human capital, 3) credit/market-entry granted from social networks, and 4) consumer trust gained from social capital/gender. It appears the investigation and development of compost microenterprises should be more cognizant of opportunities related to coworker characteristics, especially those related to social capital and collective action. As a result, management training can be integrated within entrepreneurship development to sustain urban and rural economies.

4 Abstract: In this paper we describe a field experiment conducted among mollusk harvesters in a community on the Pacific Coast of Colombia. The experiment is based on a standard linear public good and consists of two stages. In the first stage we compare the ability of monetary and nonmonetary sanctions among community members to increase contributions to the public good. In the second stage we add a government regulation with either a high or low sanction for noncompliance to community enforcement efforts. The results for the first stage are consistent with other comparisons of monetary and nonmonetary sanctions within groups; both led to higher contributions. The results from the second stage reveal that government regulations always complemented community enforcement efforts. While the subjects tended to reduce their sanctioning efforts under the government regulations, contributions and earnings were significantly higher than without government interventions. In fact, the combination of community and government enforcement efforts generated near-perfect contributions to the public good. However, more research into the combined roles of government intervention and community enforcement efforts is needed because the complementarity we find may be situation-specific.

In this chapter, I investigate through a public good in rural Colombia how different institutional arrangements, particularly different external regulations, with a common characteristic—an external regulator with a weak enforcement capacity—derive into different contributions and compliances. I tested two monetary regulations and found that high penalties very often do more harm than good. I also found that low penalties and public and private reminders were very effective at increasing cooperation and rule compliance.

Purpose – This chapter tests the effectiveness of different institutions to fundraise for environmental projects at tourism destinations. Methodology – We conduct a series of experiments with tourists visiting the Island of Majorca, Spain, and test the fundraising capacity of a voluntary donation scheme, two tax levels, and a matching instrument. In the first treatment of our experiment, tourists have the opportunity to make a voluntary donation to a local environmental organization involved in environmental projects. In a high-tax and low-tax treatment, tourists are taxed some proportion of their initial endowment and then are allowed to make voluntary contributions from their remaining endowment. In a final treatment, the experimenters match, one-for-one, any voluntary donations. Findings – We test the crowding-out hypothesis of taxes over voluntary environmental donations and find imperfect crowding-out (from 60% to 65% for different tax levels).We also explore potential crowding-in of matching instruments (widely used in nontourism settings for fundraising campaigns), but do not find any support for it. Practical Implications – Our results support the conclusion that it would be reasonable to use voluntary donation programs and tourism taxes complementarily (instead of independently), to increase fundraising for environmental purposes at tourism destinations.

"We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems."

This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The goal is to investigate the relative effectiveness of exogenous regulatory pressure and pro-social emotions in promoting cooperative behavior in a public goods context. The random public revelation of an individual’s contribution and its consequences for the rest of the group leads to significantly higher public good contributions and social welfare than regulatory pressure, even under regulations that are designed to motivate fully efficient contributions.