Conference Paper

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10535/4

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Causes for Conflicts in Irrigation Systems in Nepal: Using the IAD Framework to Find the Weakest Link
(2003) Ternström, Ingela
"For various and obvious reasons, it is important to understand what it is that makes common pool resource management systems function or fail. It is possible to target this question from two different directions. Either from the inside of the common pool resource management systems, looking at its different characteristics and deciding which are the most important ones, or from the outside, looking at which attributes of the environment are more harmful and analyse how and why this is so. In this paper I use the second way to tackle the problem and to develop a way of finding the weakest link of a common pool resource system. I do this by mapping the findings of an empirical study of cooperation in irrigation systems in Nepal onto the Institutional Analysis and Development framework used and developed at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. This way, I can get an understanding for not only which, but also why certain factors are more likely to have a negative effect on the functioning of these irrigation systems. Analysing the results of the exercise will hopefully provide a picture of what are the most vulnerable parts of the intricate fabric of a common pool resource management system."
Communal villages, reparatory justice and social trust in post-communist Romania
(2024) Dumitru, Adelin-Costin; Diaconu, David
For centuries, the free Romanian peasants managed forests, pastures or infrastructure as commons. Some of the commons were managed by a self-governing organization, the obste. The imposition of the communist regime in 1948 meant that the obsti had been dismantled. In the late 1990s, during the transition to democracy, members of the old obsti made efforts to re-establish the old organization, efforts concretized in 2000, when a new law allowed the obsti to function again. In this paper, we focus at first on describing the positive process of re-establishing the Obsti and the restitution processes after 1989. Afterwards, adopting a position according to which reparatory justice is necessary in order to restore the moral fabric of societies which had been affected in the past by egregious historical injustices, we analyze those processes' normative implications. Issues such as whether or not it is fair to focus on righting past wrongs and dealing with those who benefited from historical injustice or who are the relevant duty-bearers in present societies have received much attention in the literature on reparatory justice. Nonetheless, the case of re-establishing the Obsti poses new, challenging problems to this ever-growing research direction.
Entitlements, Rights, and Fairness: Some Experimental Results
(1983) Hoffman, Elizabeth; Spitzer, Matthew L.
"This paper reports the results of a set of experiments designed to test our hypothesis about subjects' attitudes towards the connection between methods of allocating property entitlements and the fairness (or justice) of regarding those entitlements as rights. We generate testable hypotheses by making a theoretical connection of the following sort: if a subject holds a particular theory of fairness about entitlements and rights, then he will tend to act in certain ways."
Forgotten Voters: Media Coverage in Split Congressional Districts
(2002) Wagner, Michael W.
"An unintended consequence of redisricting at the congressional level is that those who live in split congressional districts may be provided less media coverage of those who are running for Congress in their district. A content analysis of the major newspapers for several counties that are split into several different congressional districts finds that those who live in districts that make up a small percentage of a county receive systematically less newspaper coverage of their candidates for Congress than do those who live in the part(s) of a county that have larger percentages of it inside a different congressional district. The analysis also finds that newspaper coverage of both candidates is almost wholly a function of coverage of the candidate that ends up losing the election. Several implications are drawn from the analysis, including an argument that the information asymmetries thrust upon those living in split congressional districts can negatively impact issues of voter turnout and self-governance."
Local Leadership and the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods: Field Evidence from Bolivia
(2013) Jack, B. Kelsey; Recalde, María P.
"We conduct a controlled field experiment in 52 communities in rural Bolivia to investigate the effect that local authorities have on voluntary public good provision. In our study, community members pool resources to provide environmental education material for local schools. We find that voluntary contributions increase when democratically elected local authorities lead by example. The results are driven by two factors: (1) individuals give more when they are called upon to lead than when they give in private, and (2) high leader contributions increase the contributions of others. Both effects are stronger when authorities, as compared to randomly selected community members, lead by example. We explore two underlying channels of leadership influence. First, we show that leaders signal information about the quality of the public good through their contribution decisions. Second, we explore how leader characteristics affect the likelihood that others follow. Specifically, our study shows that randomly selected community members are more influential the more they resemble authorities on observable characteristics."
Nationalisation, Property Rights and the Dilemmas of Coastal Commons Management in Kerala
(2011) Joy, Rosewine
"Across world resource management is experiencing an approach towards top to down; i.e. incorporating more communitarian arrangements in policy and decision making. However; in India and Kerala since 1980, has experimented a series of aquarian reforms and policies for marine resource management which is bottom to top approach. The new inland fisheries policy of 2010 is the last nail to the coffin. These reforms tend to disregard the institutional needs of natural resource management in general and common property resource management in particular. Nationalisation of water bodies and the creation of modern forms of private property for fishing combined with exposure of local markets to global requirements led to overriding of resource. This have caused continuous decline in resources and undermined possibilities for collective action in the region.Traditional fishermen here have no legal say even though the gear/access rights were with them all overriding rights rest with the governments.This has lead to degeneration of property rights; insecure livelihoods and resource degradation. This article reviews the incentives and constrain faced by traditional fisherman in the wake of the policy reforms for common property resources management. How the communities bargain and adapt to institutional reforms for livelihood security. As well we envisage alternative directions for policy intervention for resource sustainability."
Political Weights and Cooperative Solutions to Externality Problems: The Case of Irrigation Water
(1991) Loehman, Edna T.; Dinar, Ariel
"Cooperative technology improvements may ameliorate externalities. However, cooperative solutions may not be achieved without appropriate institutional mechanisms. Here, design of such an institutional mechanism is proposed based on combining aspects of games proposed for public goods and externality problems. A solution concept, an 'acceptable cooperative solution', is also proposed; such a solution would be accepted because it is unanimously preferred to the status quo and to a noncooperative 'threat point.' The proposed institutional design is based on a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game. Both noncooperative and cooperative outcomes are defined in terms of political weights on game players. Cost shares in the cooperative case are used to cover the cost of joint facilities, and Pigouvian taxes are used to give appropriate information signals. Cost shares are equal to political weights to give incentives for correct demand revelation. At the equilibrium of such a game, a set of political weights is produced corresponding to an acceptable cooperative solution. Concepts are applied to an irrigation externality problem in the Central Valley of California to demonstrate existence of an acceptable solution."
Preference Under Risk: An Application of Nonexpected Utility Theories
(1992) Loehman, Edna T.
"Most decisions (political, economic, and social) are made in the context of risk so the subject of human behavior under risk is of interest to several disciplines. Social science researchers who apply experimental methods to study individual or group behavior in such contexts may also want to consider characterizing the risk preferences of experimental participants. The methods discussed in this paper could be used for such purposes. This paper integrates concepts from economics and psychology regarding how to model preference over gambles. A method for measuring risk preference combining revealed preference and nonlinear programming is proposed. A small demonstration of the method was used to compare alternative theories of risk preference. The application reveals contradictions of economic and psychology theories in terms of the assumption of risk aversion and models of the utility function. One particular theory (expected utility with rank dependent probabilities) among those tested seems to provide an adequate model of behavior and thus is recommended for further experimental research."
Sacred Forests in Modern Ganda Society
(1994) Gombya-Ssembajjwe, William S.
"Institutional arrangements can be extensive in form. They include the particular options available, the sequencing of those options, the information provided, and the relative rewards and punishments assigned to different sequences of the actions. All these can affect the pattern of outcome achieved. The particular structure of the physical environment involved also has a major impact on the structure of institutional arrangement and its results. Thus, a set of rules used in one physical environment may have vastly different consequences if used in a different physical environment."
The Structure and Contributions of Relational Contracts: Theory and Evidence from Oil and Gas Unit Operating Agreements
(1997) Libecap, Gary D.; Smith, James L.
"This paper provides new theoretical clarification and empirical evidence about relational contracts written for the exploitation of oil and gas reservoirs in the United States and Canada. To mitigate common pool losses, oil fields often are developed under unit operating agreements. These agreements are classical relational contracts: They are long term (often 20 years or more), include many parties (typically ten or more firms), involve considerable uncertainty about geological and economic conditions, address site-specific investments, and align the incentives of the oil-producing firms over the life of the contract to maximize the economic value of the reservoir without repeated re contracting. The paper presents a theoretical framework describing the essential elements necessary for unit operating agreements to be successful as relational contracts. It examines 60 unit operating agreements to determine whether the theoretical provisions are found empirically."
Testing a Coordination Process for Shared Goods: The Possibility of Successful Collective Action
(1997) Loehman, Edna T.; Rassenti, Stephen J.
"This paper reports the design and testing of a coordination process for finding a group agreement simultaneously about cost sharing and the nature of a shared good. The process was designed to search for a cost sharing equilibrium, a particular type of Pareto optimum. The cost share equilibrium is a generalization of a Lindahl equilibrium in that it uses personalized prices to determine cost shares. The experiment tested a two-stage game: a proposal phase based on a coordination algorithm; and a voting stage to find a unanimous agreement. No demand revelation incentives were used, but unanimity voting seemed to inhibit free-riding. Outcomes close to Pareto optimal were obtained in three rounds, even with some misrepresentation of demands. Examination of individual behavior reveals that strategic behavior is affected by institutional rules, information, and group interactions."
U.S. Land Policy, Property Rights, and The Dust Bowl of the 1930s
(2001) Libecap, Gary D.; Hansen, Zeynep K.
"Many environmental issues examined by economists and political scientists, such as common-pool problems, result from the absence of well-defined property rights. The issue examined in this paper, is a different, although related one. Here we address the environmental costs of an inappropriate allocation of property rights, where the rights distribution does not rapidly adjust to a more efficient arrangement."

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