|
Abstract:
|
"'This person is at the heart of the system' said a Nepalese farmer about the leader of their irrigation system, 'without him there would be no irrigation'. There is ample empirical evidence of the importance of leadership for successful management of common-pool resources (CPRs), not least in dealing with the effects of various kinds of disturbances. However, it is hard to find a way to fit leadership into the theories of CPR management, especially if we also want to understand the emergence of leadership. In this paper I develop a model that provides a theoretical explanation for why there are leaders in CPRs, how the leader is selected and who will be the leader. I treat the interaction between CPR users as consisting of a number of different encounters, with different characteristics. Some encounters are best described as non-cooperative games and some are best described as coordination games. Focussing first on coordination-like encounters, I provide a theoretical motivation for the existence of leadership. I model the role of leadership as being a focal point, or focal person, of coordination games and present conditions for when the chances are higher of achieving coordination on individuals than on actions.
"Shifting focus to the whole CPR situation, I then suggest that by viewing CPR management as a mixture and interplay between coordination and cooperation games, the effect of precedence may account for some of the mismatch between theoretical predictions and empirical results on the extent of cooperation in CPR dilemmas. If coordinating on a leader and letting this person decide was efficient in solving coordination problems, then others may be expected to follow a similar strategy in encounters similar to noncooperative games too. This explains both the existence of leadership in noncooperative game type of encounters and the high extent of cooperative outcomes."
|