An Exploration of Links Among Recognition,Autonomy, Social Capital, and Institutional Performance in a Mexican Fishery

Abstract

"Evidence of collective action among individuals to resolve problems associated with the use of shared resources has sparked the interest of researchers and policy makers. Groups of individuals have demonstrated their ability to overcome conflicts between individual and collective rationalities posed by the use of shared resources, often through the creation and maintenance of institutions for common pool resource (CPR) management. Such cooperation has lead to outcomes that run contrary to predictions of ecological and economic disaster that have emerged from interpretations of Olson's Logic of Collective Action (1965) and Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' (1968). CPR institutions are of interest not only for the challenge they pose to prevailing theory of CPR use, but also for their practicality as low cost alternative or complementary mechanisms for resource management.

"Recent work has been directed toward integrating experimental and empirical findings on individual and collective behavior in commons and public goods toward the specification of conditions for such CPR institutions. Ostrom's Governing the Commons (1990), for example, provides a framework for the analysis of CPR institutions and presents a set of design principles, or hypothesized conditions, for the emergence and maintenance of CPR institutions."