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Abstract:
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"The CPR question about which we know the most is that about the conditions under which groups of CP resource users will or will not develop institutions for cooperative management. In this paper I will review the emerging theory about the emergence of self-organized cooperation in the use and management of common resources. My framework will be an adaptation of what has been learned through case studies, experiments, and logic about ways that some CPR users overcome free-rider and other problems to develop more-or- less workable systems of CPR management.
"An initial condition is recognition of an existing or anticipated problem on the part of one or more members of a group of CPR users. Such recognition may be affected by the attributes of the resource in question as well as the capacity of the users to monitor and evaluate its status. Resource attributes include degrees of variability, risk, uncertainty, scarcity, density, mobility, and so forth. Some CPR users may also recognize and be willing to act upon the risky possibilities that a group may emerge as an effective unit for collective action. This may be affected by the culture, social structure, and history of the users in question, as well as their relationships to other social units. Another condition is how important the particular CPR management challenge seems in relation to other issues or problems facing people. Still, nothing will happen unless people see possible solutions to the problem that they, individually or collectively, can take, and then, can weigh the costs and benefits of the alternatives including no action. Doing this requires some kind of deliberative forum, where information can be shared and conflicts and ideas aired. The nature and functioning of this process is critical and it is affected by local leadership, the existence of other institutions, and relationships with outside governmental and non-governmental groups. The degree to which deliberation is embedded in local culture, social relations and experiences as well as the extent to which conclusions are reached through 'communicative rationality' are important. The conclusions reached by those who get to this deliberative process are likely to be highly variable, specific to certain socio-cultural, political-economic, and ecological-productive conditions, making it difficult to predict outcomes. It is easier to predict emergence outcomes where the process is driven by outside governmental and NGO agencies, but it may be more difficult to predict the sustainability of the institutional arrangements developed in that case.
"I will also consider resistance and threats to user-based CPR management. Among the obstacles or challenges that seem particularly salient today are demographic changes, including the forced and voluntary movement of people across landscapes and ecological systems; fiscal and development policies which work against local and cooperative institutional arrangements; unrealistic expectations for privatization policies, e.g. in countries emerging from communism and socialism; problems of mismatched temporal and spatial scale between institutions and environmental phenomena; and the persistence and deepening of poverty and misery in much of the rural and urban world."
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