Vertical Collective Action and the Distributive Challenges of Cooperation: Experiments in the Developing World

Abstract

Article 1 - "VERTICAL COLLECTIVE ACTION: ADDRESSING VERTICAL ASYMMETRIES IN WATERSHED MANAGEMENT" Watersheds have the characteristic of connecting people vertically by water flows. The location of people along a watershed or irrigation system defines their role in the provision and appropriation of water which makes cooperation among resource users more complex. Verticality thus imposes a challenge to collective action. This paper presents the results of field experiments conducted in four watersheds of two different countries: Colombia (South America) and Kenya (Africa). We recruited 639 watersheds inhabitants from upstream, midstream and downstream locations in these basins and conducted field experiments to study the role that location in the basin plays in affecting trust and cooperation, at the provision and appropriation decisions. Two field experiments were conducted: the “Irrigation Game” a new experimental design (Cardenas et al, forthcoming; and Janssen et.al 2011) that includes the provision and appropriation nature of the resource and where location is assigned randomly, and the “Water Trust Game”, an adaptation of the Trust Game (Berg et al, 1995), where we explicitly reveal the actual location upstream or downstream of the two players. The results from the two games show that reciprocity and trust are key motivations for upstream-downstream cooperation and that the role of upstream players has more important implications in water provision decisions. However, both experiments suggest that the lack of trust from downstream players towards upstream players restricts the possibilities of cooperation among the watershed users.----------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Article 2 - "HEAD-ENDERS AS STATIONARY BANDITS IN ASYMMETRIC COMMONS: COMPARING IRRIGATION EXPERIMENTS IN THE LABORATORY AND THE FIELD" The emergence of large-scale irrigation systems has puzzled generations of social scientists, since they are particularly vulnerable to selfish rational actors who might exploit inherent asymmetries in the system (e.g. simply being the head-ender) or who might free ride on the provision of public infrastructure. As part of two related research projects that focus on how subtle social and environmental contextual variables affect the evolution and performance of institutional rules, several sets of experiments have been performed in laboratory settings at Arizona State University and in field settings in rural villages in Thailand and Colombia. In these experiments, participants make both a decision about how much to invest in public infrastructure and how much to extract from the resources generated by that public infrastructure. With both studies we find that head-enders act as stationary bandits. They do take unequal shares of the common-pool resource but if their share is very large relative to downstream participants' shares, the latter will revolt. Therefore for groups to be successful, head-enders must restrain themselves in their use of their privileged access to the common-pool resource. The comparative approach shows that this result is robust across different social and ecological contexts.