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Governance of shared resources needs to overcome collective action problems. Relational values and decision-making play a critical role in this process. Approaches are needed to stimulate self-governance, taking relational values into account. We review the literature on the use of collective action games as a tool to stimulate social learning and self-governance. We emphasize the importance of legitimacy in decision-making and the risk of crowding out internalized motivations — for instance, based on relational values — with instrumental incentive mechanisms. We further highlight the need to include ecological outcome indicators in the game design to allow the activation of relational values. Our review concludes that games used as part of a set of participatory activities enable communities to come together to identify relevant problems and craft potential solutions.
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Collective PES Contracts Can Motivate Institutional Creation to Conserve Forests: Experimental Evidence
ABSTRACT Incentives are a widely used tool for addressing deforestation and are often implemented as collective contracts. Local institutions are crucial to the solution of collective action problems associated with forest conservation, but we still have little knowledge of how to encourage institutional creation through policy. Since collective contracts do not eliminate freeriding incentives, we argue that their success hinges on their ability to stimulate the creation of institutions for collective action. To test these ideas, we analyze data from an incentivized lab‐in‐the‐field experimental collective action game played with natural resource users in four developing countries. The experiment simulates management of a common forest, and groups were randomly assigned to a conservation incentive payment condition. We observe how much group members attempt to coordinate on the creation of institutional rules and find experimental evidence that an external incentive program can stimulate the endogenous creation of informal institutions.
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- PAR ID:
- 10554328
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Conservation Letters
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1755-263X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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