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Extracellular proteases are a class of public good that support growth of Bacillus subtilis when nutrients are in a polymeric form. Bacillus subtilis biofilm matrix molecules are another class of public good that are needed for biofilm formation and are prone to exploitation. In this study, we investigated the role of extracellular proteases in B. subtilis biofilm formation and explored interactions between different public good producer strains across various conditions. We confirmed that extracellular proteases support biofilm formation even when glutamic acid provides a freely available nitrogen source. Removal of AprE from the NCIB 3610 secretome adversely affects colony biofilm architecture, while sole induction of WprA activity into an otherwise extracellular protease‐free strain is sufficient to promote wrinkle development within the colony biofilm. We found that changing the nutrient source used to support growth affected B. subtilis biofilm structure, hydrophobicity and architecture. We propose that the different phenotypes observed may be due to increased protease dependency for growth when a polymorphic protein presents the sole nitrogen source. We however cannot exclude that the phenotypic changes are due to alternative matrix molecules being made. Co‐culture of biofilm matrix and extracellular protease mutants can rescue biofilm structure, yet reliance on extracellular proteases for growth influences population coexistence dynamics. Our findings highlight the intricate interplay between these two classes of public goods, providing insights into microbial social dynamics during biofilm formation across different ecological niches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society uses the following mechanism to decide on the supply of an experience good. Each agent can choose whether or not to contribute to the good. Contributions are collected, and the good is supplied whenever total contributions exceed a threshold. We study the case where the good is excludable, agents have a common value, and each agent receives a private signal about the common value. We study how such collective decisions perform in terms of information aggregation, social efficiency, and market traction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal data increasingly serve as inputs to public goods. Like other types of contributions to public goods, personal data are likely to be underprovided. We investigate whether classical remedies to underprovision are also applicable to personal data and whether the privacy-sensitive nature of personal data must be additionally accounted for. In a randomized field experiment on a public online education platform, we prompt users to complete their profiles with personal information. Compared to a control message, we find that making public benefits salient increases the number of personal data contributions significantly. This effect is even stronger when additionally emphasizing privacy protection, especially for sensitive information. Our results further suggest that emphasis on both public benefits and privacy protection attracts personal data from a more diverse set of contributors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector's contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public goods. The paper reports on understandings of the public good role of higher education in England after nearly a decade of full marketisation. The study, part of a cross-national comparison of 11 countries, consisted of a review of major policy reports, and 24 semi-structured interviews in universities (13) and among higher education policy professionals (11) including regulators, national organisations and experts. England has no policy language for talking about outcomes of higher education other than attenuated performative outputs such as graduate salaries, research impact, knowledge exchange and widening participation, understood as individual access to education as a private good. Awareness of multiple public goods has been suppressed to justify successive fee increases and the imposition of a market in the centralised English system. This has coincided with a shift from direct government funding and collaborative stewardship by state and institutions, to student funding and top-down regulation. Nevertheless, most interviewees, including regulators, advocated an open-ended public good role and provided many examples of public goods in higher education, though the concepts lacked clarity. The policy notion of a zero-sum relation of private and public outcomes, corresponding to the split of private/public costs, was rejected in favour of a positive-sum relation of private and public outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to nurture reflections on the colonization of the future in the present with a particular focus on Africa. This paper aims at exploring how participatory research and particularly anticipatory action research can contribute to a decolonising process. Design/methodology/approach: Considering the future as a public good, this paper develops a reflection on the colonization processes that can turn it into a club or a private good. This paper mobilizes the notions of participatory knowledge production and local action research as a way to decolonize the future and empower imagination. This paper revisits the tenets of participatory action research as a means to achieve this objective and discusses the main features of a non-colonial anticipatory action research in the context of African futures. Findings: This paper highlights the challenges associated with connecting anticipatory endeavours focusing on action research, the creation of collective intelligence and co-design, with the intention of encouraging the decolonisation process. It includes design principles and anticipates a possible process of counter-decolonization. Research limitations/implications: This is a conceptual paper, which does not provide field-tested evidence. Yet, the authors hope it serves as an input enabling to design methodologies that will prevent the colonisation of the future when engaging in future-oriented research activities in Africa and elsewhere. Originality/value: This paper provides an integral approach to the colonisation of the future, as a renewed old question. This paper also connects this process with a reflection on the nature of what could be non-colonizing anticipatory action research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report experimental findings on the role of charitable promises in settings with posted offers. We vary the enforceability of such promises within variants of ultimatum games where the proposer suggests a split between herself, the responder and a charitable donation. By reneging on initial pledges, dishonest proposers can change the final allocation to their advantage. Providing ex post information on actual donations while leaving the contract incomplete outperforms a complete contract where proposers cannot renege on their charitable promises. The ex post information allows proposers to improve their image by voluntarily giving more than pledged and thus proving that the charitable pledge was not used for strategic reasons. We identify proposer competition as another (surprising) mechanism that partly eliminates cheating among accepted offers, but it also favors offers without charitable pledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Considering continuing environmental degradation linked to economic activity, it seems essential to examine the role companies can play in implementing sustainable development. This study aims to analyze lessons learned from standard theories on the effectiveness of corporate social and environmental responsibility. Indeed, corporate social responsibility and state intervention are frequently compared under the dual lens of collective well-being and environmental quality. For some economists, corporate social responsibility is preferable to state intervention from the point of view of maximizing collective well-being. By contrast, according to some other authors, state intervention is more effective for both maximizing well-being and protecting the environment. This literature review shows that corporate social responsibility is theoretically no more effective than public intervention in environmental protection: companies can be encouraged to commit themselves to protecting the environment under restrictive conditions, but this does not eliminate the essential importance of public intervention. Analysis of the assumptions of neoclassical models shows that, in reality, they do not take into account all the properties of a public good, i.e., all the properties of the climate and the environment. Finally, the conditions for implementing CSR are incompatible with maximizing collective well-being, which explains why public intervention is theoretically preferable to CSR.

Beginning in 2012, several states enacted right-to-work laws, which hamper the ability of labor unions to collect agency fees to finance union services and activities. Because the processes by which these adoptions took place are arguably exogenous, identification of the causal effect of right-to-work on unionization within a state becomes possible. The author uses a set of semi-independent cross-sections drawn from the Current Population Survey for years 2000 to 2018 to investigate the impact of right-to-work on the probability of unionization in the five states that adopted it after 2011. The empirical analysis reveals an economically meaningful and statistically significant adverse effect from right-to-work adoption on union density that is distinct from other factors influencing unionization during that time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Intergroup aggression often results in the production of public goods, such as a safe and stable social environment and a home range containing the resources required to survive and reproduce. We investigate temporal variation in intergroup aggression in a growing population of colobus monkeys (Colobus vellerosus) to ask a novel question: “Who stepped-up to produce these public goods when doing so became more difficult?”. Both whole-group encounters and male incursions occurred more frequently as the population grew. Males and females were both more likely to participate in whole-group encounters when monopolizable food resources were available, indicating both sexes engaged in food defence. However, only females increasingly did so as the population grew, suggesting that it was females who increasingly produced the public good of home range defence as intergroup competition intensified. Females were also more active in male incursions at high population densities, suggesting they increasingly produced the public good of a safe and stable social environment. This is not to say that males were chronic free-riders when it came to maintaining public goods. Males consistently participated in the majority of intergroup interactions throughout the study period, indicating they may have lacked the capacity to invest more time and effort.

This article adopts an institutionalist perspective in order to address the energy transition process and to consider, in particular, the alternative financing mechanisms that would be able to support a structural transformation that is sustainable in the long term. It argues that such a transformation can be regarded in a holistic and broader way as an eco-transition process that involves the whole society and economy and requires a societal public organization. A relevant holistic approach to eco-transition should focus on the institutional conditions that are required for a new sustainable and structural change framework. In this aim, the article points to the features of the transition process that display the characteristics of a public good. The durable provision of such a good calls for the transformation of the financing schemes in force to support green investments beyond the usual opposition between market-friendly and government-guided economic policies. A relevant avenue is to organize the financing of the eco-transition under the supervision of public institutions even though the contribution of private bodies might be valuable according to the rules of long-term non-speculative financial support of markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is a social field marked by struggles, alliances, and conflicts. The Open University for the Third Age (UNATI or, in English, u3a) is part of this social field and is not exempt from the conflicts between education aimed at the development and quality of life of older adults and education focused on the market and productivity. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyze UNATI as a public good, meaning a good whose access should not result in the exclusion or rivalry of others. Methodologically, this is an exploratory and bibliographic study. The development of this article is based on concepts developed by Bourdieu (1996; 2003), Gramsci (1982), and Marx (1983), along with other references related to senior citizens. Finally, the article demonstrates how the UNATI program at the State University of Maringá-PR impacts the lives of the elderly, highlighting positive outcomes in their existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1948, Article 27(1) UDHR declared the right 'to share in scientific advancement and its benefits'. Since 1966, the right has also been guaranteed by Article 15(1)(b) ICESCR as the right to 'enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications'. This equivocation on the right's name reveals a disagreement about the object of that right, i.e. (actively) participating in the scientific practice or (passively) 'enjoying its fruits' only. While the importance of participation in science has recently been emphasised, no justifications thereof have yet been provided. Drawing on considerations in human rights theory, the present article proposes an interpretation of Article 15(1)(b) ICESCR qua 'right to participate in scientific practice and enjoy its benefits'. It starts with an account of the genesis of the right. Second, it argues that science is best approached as a 'participatory good', both from the perspective of the philosophy of science and of other rights guaranteed by the ICESCR. Third, the article spells out the participatory dimensions of the human right to participate in science including its 'collective' dimensions. Finally, the article explores three institutional implications of the proposed participatory interpretation of the right, both domestically and internationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biobanking in Singapore is characterized by contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices, and different notions of what the (potential) value of storing samples and data for medical research is. Different biobanking efforts anticipate the production of public goods from stored materials in specifically situated ways. These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction, a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values. In exploring the extraction of potential value in relation to practice values, I propose the notion of value formations to account for the coproduction of and intersections between different forms of value(s) in scientific practices situated in particular social contexts. I trace value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Observations along this life span show the social and temporal complexity of value-making in biobanking in Singapore, pointing to the contextual specificity of how biobanking is understood as a public good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sacral historical monuments are primarily places of prayer, but also objects performing numerous other functions. These are public goods, including cultural goods that build national identity. Their preservation in the right condition is important not only for the owner, but also for the public authorities, whose duty is to preserve them for future generations. The study concerns the financing of sacral monuments in Poland. Its aim is to indicate the legitimacy of financing the revalorization of sacral monuments from public funds, the solutions applied in this area in Poland, and the sources and amount of support provided to the owners of these objects in the years 2017–2022. In it, the authors: (1) refer to such concepts as: public good, cultural good and cultural heritage, (2) define—based on Polish regulations—the concept of a sacral monument and indicate the multiplicity of functions that these objects perform, (3) present the number and types of sacral monuments in Poland, taking into account their location, (4) identify available sources of public funds for the revalorization of sacral monuments in Poland. The analyses carried out show that in Poland, every year, public funds play an important role in the revalorization of sacral historical monuments. In real terms, its volume remained at a similar level over the period considered. The methods used in the development are as follows: critical analysis of the literature and legal acts and selected methods of descriptive statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an initial overview of different ideas about the value of Official Statistics systems. For the purposes of this paper, an Official Statistics ‘system’ is taken to cover the set of organisations (within a country) that are involved in the production, communication, use and governance of Official Statistics. The paper seeks to analyse the stated ambitions for, or the claims about, these systems that are contained within a sample of formal corporate documents mainly produced by different national statistical organisations.These sources offer a range of diverse ideas about different types of value that societies may secure from having well-functioning Official Statistics systems. There are some foundational ideas of value that are often referenced – including the ambition that good Official Statistics will enable good (or better) decision-making by governments and others, which in turn will generate positive outcomes for society.The analysis also flags a range of ambitions for wider outcomes that might be secured by well-functioning Official Statistics systems – for example, outcomes for citizens (enabling them to be better informed, represented and empowered), outcomes for governments (contributing to a better more effective governmental process) or outcomes in terms of having better informed public debate.Collectively these concepts could inform any wider framework developed to communicate the potential value of Official Statistics systems, complementing the more specific expressions of value that might emerge directly from the views and judgements of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public good is a topic that has been extensively addressed throughout the history of political philosophy. Aristotle uses the idea of the "public good" as the basis for his distinction between "right" constitutions, which lead to the common benefit, and "wrong" constitutions, which benefit the rulers. The utilitarian thinker, Stuart Mill, believes that the most important public good is the act or rule of action. He considers the public good acceptable only if it leads to the dominance of good over evil in the world at least as much as any other option. Therefore, the criterion for evaluating any action is the increase or decrease in the level of happiness and satisfaction of society. In Islamic thought, from the perspective of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, the key to understanding the public good is the evaluation of human actions. He believes that before understanding the public good, one must have an understanding of the types of pleasure and their relationship to interests. A person can reach an understanding of the public good if they comprehend the source of moral goodness and badness and if their intellect can discern the difference between benefit and harm, seeking the public good without mixing it with harm and not merely judging with the aim of achieving material and worldly benefits. This article uses a comparative analytical method to examine the views of these two thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature featuring game–theoretical models aimed at explaining the effect of the status concerns on the voluntary provision of a public good is generally focused on snob agents, driven by a desire for exclusiveness. However, the social context literature highlights that status concerns can give rise to a desire, in some individuals to be different from the "common herd," and in some others to conform with other people. We analyze a two‐player public good game under two different settings: The standard case with two positional players (PPs), versus the case in which the positional player faces a conformist player (PC). Giving entrance to conformism has two main implications. Strong status concerns by both players can lead to a virtuous cycle in which the conformist player wishes to imitate the contributing behavior of the positional player, and the latter wishes to increase contribution to distinguish herself from the former. Then, the contribution to the public good can be higher than in the case with only snob agents. This higher contribution can increase social welfare, but only if endowments are not too large and the status concern of the positional player is not excessively high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We experimentally test a model of public good bargaining due to Bowen et al. (Am Econ Rev 104:2941–2974, 2014) and compare two institutions governing bargaining over public good allocations. The setup involves two parties negotiating the distribution of a fixed endowment between a public good and each party’s individual account. Parties attach either high or low weight to the public good and the difference in these weights reflects the degree of polarization. Under discretionary bargaining rules, the status quo default allocation to the group account (in the event of disagreement) is zero while under the mandatory bargaining rule it is equal to the level last agreed upon. The mandatory rule thus creates a dynamic relationship between current decisions and future payoffs, and our experiment tests the theoretical prediction that the efficient level of public good is provided under the mandatory rule while the level of public good funding is at a sub-optimal level under the discretionary rule. Consistent with the theory, we find that proposers (particularly those attaching high weight to the public good) propose significantly greater allocations to the public good under mandatory rules than under discretionary rules and this result is strengthened with an increase in polarization. Still, public good allocations under mandatory rules fall short of steady state predictions, primarily due to fairness concerns that prevent proposers from exercising full proposer power.

Reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions is necessary in the fight against climate change. We are interested in the situation of Quebec (Canada), where low-cost hydropower sold below market value, akin to a consumption subsidy, leads to high residential consumption. We conducted an experiment to test whether individuals would be willing to pay more for electricity. Increasing regulated prices closer to their market value would result in a direct welfare gain and free some green energy, reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) in other sectors. Giving clear and transparent information on the consequences of the price increase induces a majority of people to choose to pay more. In addition to the economic benefit of the public good, the presence of the environmental benefit increases contributions. Participants with a more-severe budget constraint tend to contribute less. These results are encouraging for the development of efficient energy policies reducing GHG emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To meet today's grand challenges, economics requires an understanding of how common objectives may be collaboratively set and met. Tied to the assumption that the state can, at best, fix market failures and is always at risk of "capture", economic theory has been unable to offer such a framework. To move beyond such limiting assumptions, the article provides a renewed conception of the common good, going beyond the classic public good and commons approach, as a way of steering and shaping (rather than just fixing) the economy towards collective goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present experimental evidence for decision settings where public good providers compete for endogenous rewards which are donations (transfers) offered by outside donors. Donors receive benefits from public good provision but cannot provide the good themselves. The performance of three competition mechanisms is examined in relation to the level of public good provision and transfers offered by donors. In addition to a contest where transfers received by public good providers are proportional to effort, we study two contests with exclusion from transfers, namely a winner-takes-all and a loser-gets-nothing. We compare behavior in these three decision settings to the default setting of no-contest (no-transfers). Results for this novel decision environment with endogenous transfers show that donors offer transfers (contest prizes) at similar levels across contests and contributions to the public good are not significantly different in the three contests settings, but are consistently and significantly higher in all contests compared to the setting with no-transfers. Initially, the winner-takes-all setting leads to a significantly higher increase in public good contributions compared to the other two contests; but this difference diminishes across decision rounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of domestic security has become increasingly complex over the past decades. As there is an increasing overlap between private and public provision of security, the question of how to allocate responsibility for security between the public sphere (state) and the private sphere has become important. Concepts that can provide both clarity and sufficient complexity are much needed. This article offers an institutional economics concept. This implies a method where basic elements of neoclassical public finance (e.g. differences like provision v. production or public v. private goods) are combined with explicitly institutional and security economic elements (degree of prevention, specificity, repressivity, state monopoly on the use of force). As a result, a normative distinction between state and private security responsibilities based on qualitative arguments is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, data-driven systems have transformed how UK public services engage with the population. This ethnographic study, conducted in one of the United Kingdom's poorest boroughs, investigates the implementation of a machine learning data system for identifying at-risk children in need of safeguarding. It examines the concept of a 'data consensus' amongst council workers pursuing the 'public good'. Within this consensus, the article explores contrasting stances on data's potential, namely that of data scientists, who use it as a tool to predict human behaviour and prevent harm, and social workers, who resist the notion that a person is predictable and therefore incapable of change. This reveals the political implications of these opaque algorithmic systems as various groups harness data in the name of public benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official statistics are widely considered to be public goods, however this paper explores a higher aspiration: that they also serve the public good. To achieve this goal, and provide value to societies worldwide, there is a need for discussion around what it truly means for statistics to serve the public good. This paper shares initial perspectives on the matter from the United Kingdom Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) before demonstrating how serving the public good fits with customer-centric perspectives on value, and calling for interested parties to join this discussion so that we may work together in service of statistics for a global good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens United has stimulated a cottage industry of legal scholarship on corruption. A prominent stream of this literature is self-consciously atheoretical and suggests that the current state of corruption jurisprudence suffers from a misconceived reliance on liberal political theories and a rejection of the public good. We argue that it is impossible to understand specific acts of corruption without a political theory explaining why such actions are wrong. We show that the current jurisprudence relies on a mistaken intellectual history of the public good and a political theory of American constitutionalism that commodifies citizenship and treats political participation as a market good. Pace Teachout, we cannot draw the bright lines many legal scholars desire without a better political theory of the primary goods we want to protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of private security across the globe has sparked concerns that a central public good is being corporatized, and that policing will no longer be guided by the interests of 'the public'. In this article, we argue that state policing has never been in the interests of 'the public'. Instead, like all policing actors, the state police create and serve something more finite: 'a public'. By exploring the 'publics of policing' we gain important insights into the constitutive role policing plays in producing socio–political communities. We suggest that this represents an important addition to the nodal governance framework, which currently overlooks the importance of what corporate, state and civic actors create when they engage in policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public transportation, one of the basic services provided by a modern state, is of strategic-national importance and has implications for national security. Transportation impacts individual lives, the economy, society, demography, and quality of life. These aspects are relevant to decision making at the government level and include elements in decisions taken with national security considerations. At the political level decisions must be guided by the will to serve the public interest, and should facilitate, rather than block, reforms and innovations in the field. This article emphasizes that despite the importance of public transportation and its impact on the development of the economy and, and in turn on national strength and national security, in Israel this field is characterized by ongoing market and administrative failures. In fact, the situation resembles a "march of folly," in which decision makers operate contrary to national and public needs arising from demand, and contrary to normative professional considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceptualizes “free” higher education as a public good. It draws on a qualitative study conducted between 2018‒2019, exploring academics’ understanding of the relationship between higher education and the public good, and the conditions of possibility for higher education to be and contribute to the public good. In so doing, this article argues that funding for free education is a necessary condition for higher education to be a public good that can be accessed by students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. It argues that commodification of higher education undermines the public good character of higher education, and ultimately reproduces inequalities in society, and the injustices of the past, particularly in a country like South Africa characterised by colonial and apartheid histories. It anchors this argument on an analysis of 15 in-depth one-onone interviews with academics from historically white and historically black universities in South Africa. From this analysis emerged three main findings on the issue of higher education funding. Firstly, the view that funding for higher education is scarce due to austerity, among other things. Secondly, the notion that if higher education is a public good and for the public good, it must be funded by the state. Lastly, the argument that adopting private funding models opens higher education to commodification, elitism, and the risk of being captured and used as an instrument of advancing private goods at the expense of the public good. The implication of these findings is the notion that when fees fall, one obstacle is removed, opening access to higher education – a public good – even for the poorest of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of refugees die each year fleeing prosecution in their home state. But receiving states are often reluctant to admit, process and house refugees. This is in part because refugee protection is a public good, and so subject to free-riding. A promising, but controversial, solution is to set up markets in tradable refugee quotas (e.g., in the European Union). One of the main objections to such proposals is that they lead to the commodification and objectification of refugees. Another objection, less often discussed, is that such markets seem to legitimate negative and prejudicial attitudes towards refugees. In this article, I defend markets in refugee quotas against such criticisms. Given how many die each year, we are more than ever in need of creative solutions. Tradable quotas provide a promising mechanism to increase the number of refugees processed and protected, especially in regional schemes like the EU. Ethical objections such as the ones canvassed here should not stand in our way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the ruined Urakami Cathedral, situated prominently on a hilltop close to ground zero, became an iconic site. It represented the rupture experienced by a totally devastated community and landscape in an irradiated environment at the end of World War II. Yet, beginning in 1958, the ruins of the building were razed and the cathedral reconstructed – an act that has remained controversial in the Japanese public sphere, not least due to partial reliance on American funding. This article examines the competing claims of value surrounding these Cathedral ruins and their erasure among the Catholic community and the non-Catholic population of Nagasaki and the politics of patronage that this involved. It draws on interviews to access the voices of atomic bombing survivors in the Catholic community, marginalised in the Japanese public discourse. These give insight into an alternative communal understanding of the cathedral tied into a much older narrative of persecution, poverty, resistance, and renewal. I argue that different perspectives on the value of the Cathedral and its ruins reveal the social rupture foundational to and concomitant with competing value claims, and their interrelated political, economic, and religious dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication is well-known to increase cooperation rates in social dilemma situations, but the exact mechanisms behind this remain largely unclear. This study examines the impact of communication on public good provisioning in an artefactual field experiment conducted with 216 villagers from small, rural communities in northern Namibia. In line with previous experimental findings, we observe a strong increase in cooperation when face-to-face communication is allowed before decision-making. We additionally introduce a condition in which participants cannot discuss the dilemma but talk to their group members about an unrelated topic prior to learning about the public good game. It turns out that this condition already leads to higher cooperation rates, albeit not as high as in the condition in which discussions about the social dilemma are possible. The setting in small communities also allows investigating the effects of pre-existing social relationships between group members and their interaction with communication. We find that both types of communication are primarily effective among socially more distant group members, which suggests that communication and social ties work as substitutes in increasing cooperation. Further analyses rule out better comprehension of the game and increased mutual expectations of one’s group members’ contributions as drivers for the communication effect. Finally, we discuss the role of personal and injunctive norms to keep commitments made during discussions.