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PDF
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Type:
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Conference Paper |
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Author:
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Bråten, Ragnhild H. |
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Conference:
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Governing Shared Resources: Connecting Local Experience to Global Challenges, the Twelfth Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons |
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Location:
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Cheltenham, England |
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Conf. Date:
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July 14-18, 2008 |
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Date:
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2008 |
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URI:
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https://hdl.handle.net/10535/1866
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Sector:
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Forestry
Social Organization |
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Region:
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Africa |
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Subject(s):
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collective action
reforestation
participatory management
indigenous institutions
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Abstract:
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"This paper analyses why a certain reforestation project was successful in some villages, while not in others. The analysed forest project depended on collective action from villagers. In one village, I find what I interpret as a social norm of cooperative behaviour, which seems to have contributed to build expectations about mutual co-operation among villagers and hence increased their considered utility of co-operation. A good leader appears to have supported this co-operation norm. In the other villages, less respected leaders seem to have reduced villagers general motivation for co-operative behaviour in village projects, which have contributed to non-co-operative behaviour also in the forest project. However, one of these low cooperative villages preserved their forest by imposing hard formal penalties on some of the defectors and thus scared everybody else to co-operate. I develop a model to explain important factors in the individuals utility of co-operation versus non-cooperation in the reforestation project. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative data collected in conjunction with the Malawian Land Tenure and Social Capital project (University of Malawi/ Norwegian Institute of Urban and Regional Research)."
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