Browsing by Subject "collective action"

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Open Access
Democracy on the Commons: Political Competition and Local Cooperation for Natural Resource Management in India
(2007-05-10T16:01:44Z) Chhatre, Ashwini
This dissertation explores the effects of democratic competition among political parties in India on natural resources and the ability of local communities to cooperate for natural resource management. A significant number of decentralization policies in developing countries depend for their success on local collective action for the provision of public goods. At the same time, democratization generates multiple impulses in society, and understanding its effects on the prospects for local cooperation is important for explaining the variation in success of decentralization policies for natural resource management. I use historical and ethnographic data to understand the influence of political competition on natural resource outcomes and local collective action. The descriptive analysis draws upon theoretical and empirical literatures on political competition, collective action, and property rights, and is used as the basis for generating hypotheses as well as specifying context-specific measurements of the relevant variables for statistical analysis. I test the hypotheses on two sets of dependent variables – local cooperation and forest condition – and three datasets covering community-based irrigation and forest management systems, co-management institutions for irrigation, soil conservation, and forest management, as well as state-managed forests as the null category without decentralized management. The findings show that an inclusive pattern of political mobilization and party competition have increased the salience of environment and forests in the public domain and democratic politics, with a positive effect on resource outcomes. Further, natural resources are better managed by decentralized institutions, compared to state management. However, communities located in highly competitive electoral districts find it significantly more difficult to cooperate due to interference from political parties. Moreover, communities that are heterogeneous along the salient issue dimension in democratic politics are the worst affected. On the other hand, better representation of sub-group interests in community affairs, prevalence of democratic practices, and linkages of community leaders to multiple political parties are associated with higher levels of local cooperation. In conclusion, the findings demonstrate that communities are better at natural resource management than state agencies, but the impulses generated by democratization can constrain the ability of local communities to manage natural resources.
Open Access
Institutional Roots of Authoritarian Rule in the Middle East: Civic Legacies of the Islamic Waqf
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2014-06-12) Kuran, T
In the pre-modern Middle East the closest thing to an autonomous private organization was the Islamic waqf. This non-state institution inhibited political participation, collective action, and rule of law, among other indicators of democratization. It did so through several mechanisms. Its activities were essentially set by its founder, which limited its capacity to meet political challenges. Being designed to provide a service on its own, it could not participate in lasting political coalitions. The waqf’s beneficiaries had no say in evaluating or selecting its officers, and they had trouble forming a political community. Thus, for all the resources it controlled, the Islamic waqf contributed minimally to building civil society. As a core element of Islam’s classical institutional complex, it perpetuated authoritarian rule by keeping the state largely unrestrained. Therein lies a key reason for the slow pace of the Middle East’s democratization process.
Open Access
The Synergy of the Commons: Learning and Collective Action in One Case Study Community
(2007-12-13) Clark, Charlotte
Formation of voluntary collective action provides a synergy whereby communities can accomplish environmental management improvement. To study this formative process, I asked four research questions:. How does group learning happen and how is it distributed among individuals in a collective?. How does voluntary collective action form, particularly around environmental issues?. What is the relationship between these first two questions?. What themes emerge that might inform communities or environmental managers who wish to promote voluntary collective action in communities?To answer these questions, I conducted a five-year case study of one community during which I observed the teaching and learning process and the formation of voluntary collective action arrangements. Data include over 5000 emails, minutes from 135 community meetings, observations of meetings and community gatherings, documents (bylaws, policies, guidelines, covenants), and 46 personal interviews with community members. I describe the community learning process through four characteristics: a setting in everyday life; a shared and constructed perspective among learners; a context where process is more important than product; and roles that are non-hierarchal and flexible. I propose the term co-facilitated community learning for this learning process, and provide evidence that it played a critical role in the development of voluntary collective agreements. I describe the typical chronology whereby voluntary collective action arrangements were formed in the case study community, and list the major environmental collective action arrangements developed. Many arrangements negotiated and approved by the case study community address significant environmental problems that have proven intransigent to other forms of management such as regulation and financial markets.I name collective action competence as the link between collective awareness and collective behavior change, and define it as the readiness of a group of people to behave towards a common goal based on a collective awareness, and a collective set of skills and experiences.Four themes emerge that might inform those who wish to promote voluntary collective action in communities to improve environmental management: (1) use of consensus-type governance, (2) reducing costs of cooperation, (3) use of normative pressures, and (4) good information communication and reinforcement.
Open Access
When the Canals Run Dry: New Institutions and the Collective Governance of Irrigation Systems in Tajikistan
(2018) Hannah, Corrie
I present a study of how water users, namely farmers, choose to participate in new institutions for irrigation governance and how these new institutions contribute to irrigation infrastructure conditions. Institutions are the sets of working rules or rules in use for manage natural resources. In the process of decentralizing irrigation management since the late 1990’s, the government of Tajikistan has created over 400 formal Water User Associations (WUAs). WUAs are non-governmental organizations, which aim to increase the participation of local water users in the management of irrigation systems. Despite significant governmental and international organization efforts to establish new WUA institutions, the degree to which water users participate in and adopt WUA institutions in Tajikistan in new WUAs remains uncertain. I explore the following research questions in this dissertation: 1) How do water users participate in new WUA institutions in Tajikistan? 2) How do new WUA institutions in Tajikistan affect irrigation infrastructure conditions? 3) How do the contextual features of a locale affect the adoption of new WUA institutions in Tajikistan?
I used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and theories of institutional change from the literature on governing common pool resources, as well as the disciplines of sociology, political science, and evolutionary economic geography. I collected data in Tajikistan in 2015-2016. Qualitative data consist of field observations and water user focus groups in four WUAs in southwestern Tajikistan, and semi-structured and narrative interviews with key actors involved in the development of new WUA institutions across three 100-kilometer rural-urban study sites in Tajikistan. Quantitative data include structured interviews with 159 WUA conducted in the same three rural-urban study sites.
First, I examined how four preconditions for self-organization (trust and reciprocity, common understanding, water user and WUA autonomy, and prior organizational experience) drive water user participation in irrigation infrastructure maintenance activities. I conducted a qualitative comparative case study of four WUAs using data from my field observations, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews. The four WUA case studies were selected based on water availability and estimated levels of trust among water users that were obtained from structured interviews. Results showed that the preconditions for self-organization were positively associated with farmer and WUA contributions to irrigation infrastructure maintenance activities. However, water user participation in maintenance activities was not associated with better irrigation infrastructure conditions.
Second, I investigated how new WUA institutions predicted the participation of water users in irrigation governance and irrigation infrastructure conditions. Using the Institutional Development and Analysis (IAD) framework to pose my hypotheses, I examined how collective choice arrangements, monitoring, and sanctions affected water user rule compliance, water user participation in maintenance activities, and irrigation infrastructure conditions. I performed ordered logistic regression analyses on data from structured interviews with 159 WUA leaders. Results revealed that collective choice arrangements, rather than monitoring and sanctions, positively predicted water user compliance of WUA rules. Water user compliance of WUA rules, rather than water user participation in maintenance activities, was positively associated with irrigation infrastructure conditions. Implications of the findings suggested that collective choice arrangements and rule compliance play a critical role in facilitating irrigation infrastructure conditions, yet monitoring and sanctioning rules have not been fully established in new, yet evolving WUA institutions in Tajikistan.
Finally, I studied how the contextual features of a locale affect water user adoption of new WUA institutions. I hypothesized that water users are more likely to adopt WUA institutions when WUA service areas are located close to urban centers, have greater frequencies of interactions with state officials, and have a limited history of irrigation practices. Using data from 159 structured interviews with WUA leaders, results from ordinal logistic regression analyses illustrated that WUA adoption was associated with endogenous variables that affect water users’ choice to adopt WUA institutions, such as WUA service areas’ distance to urban centers and the dependence on food production as a means of supporting livelihoods. In addition, WUA adoption was also associated with exogenous variables, such as the frequency of government officials’ visits to the locales where the WUA service areas were located, as well as household consumption of food products from beyond WUA service areas. I conducted a narrative analysis based on narrative interviews to corroborate these findings.
Broader implications of my dissertation revealed that water user adoption of new WUA institutions was contingent on local contexts and levels of trust, reciprocity, and common understanding amongst all actors in Tajikistan’s irrigation sector. Water user and WUA autonomy were important for sustaining WUA institutions beyond the initial WUA formations. Yet, some level of financial and technical contributions from the government of Tajikistan and international organization were necessary for maintaining larger irrigation infrastructure, especially since the scales of infrastructures that water users inherited from the Soviet Union did not match smaller scale WUA irrigation infrastructure maintenance efforts. Finally, existing institutional frameworks and literatures for studying common pool resources did not sufficiently capture the characteristics and evolution of new institutions (i.e., institutions as young as one to thirty years), especially since most common pool resource studies have focused on characterizing long-enduring institutions (i.e., institutions greater than 100 years). I highlighted some key features of new institutions for natural resource systems: 1) a certain amount of time for learning and adaptation is necessary for formal rules to promote normative behaviors among resource users (i.e., monitoring and sanctioning rules); 2) credible commitments and communication foster trust in and common understanding of new institutions for resource governance; 3) in the early stages of developing and implementing new institutions, resource user autonomy and participation contribute to the ongoing use of those institutions; and 4) geographic, historical, and social contexts can influence resource users’ considerations and incentives regarding whether new institutions are worth pursuing. In my concluding chapter, I emphasized the need for further study of the characteristics and evolution of new institutions for natural resource governance beyond current frameworks of well established, long enduring institutions.