By: Krister Andersson, Kimberlee Chang, Adriana Molina-Garzon

Publication Date: October 2020

Abstract:

 Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse.

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Also, CU Today published a press release about the article that you can read here!

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Krister Andersson, University of Colorado Boulder; Kimberlee Chang, University of Colorado Boulder 

Published: October 4, 2019

Abstract: 

Social, biophysical, and institutional contexts affect forest users’ incentives to work together to restore forests. With renewed government commitments to support such activities, we argue that effective interventions need to consider several context-specific factors – such as the user groups’ future discount rates, opportunity costs, and collective-action capabilities – because these factors will help determine the effectiveness of such interventions. To test the effects of a suite of contextual factors, we analyzed observations from 184 different groups in 133 forests across eight developing countries. We find that the combination of certain enabling factors increases the probability of users undertaking forest improvement activities, and that social contexts can condition the effect of institutional and biophysical contexts. Our findings carry implications for the design and implementation of future interventions to restore forests in developing countries.

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