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Over the last decade China has become a dominant player in Africa's rapidly growing hydropower sector. These mega projects typically employ thousands of Africans yet research on labour relations at these sites remains extremely limited. This article provides a rare systematic analysis of workers’ experiences on a Chinese-financed-and-constructed hydroelectric dam in Africa. We find that chronic verbal abuse of African workers by Chinese managers is a defining feature of labour relations at this project in Uganda. This abuse has tainted many workers’ attitudes towards the Chinese contractor Sinohydro, the Chinese government, and to a lesser extent Chinese people themselves. Workers also perceive Ugandan organisations and the Ugandan government as complicit in these poor labour relations. These findings underscore the limits of accountability to labour standards by Chinese firms operating in Africa, especially in contexts where host organisations and governments fail to advocate aggressively for the rights of African workers. 

Abstract The introduction of formal collective property rights to forest lands appears to have improved both environmental and economic outcomes, but there is limited evidence on how these reforms affect cooperative behavior among local resource users. We propose that when national governments issue collective land rights, they strengthen the collective psychological ownership among coowners and produce increased levels of cooperative behavior. Analyzing data from 213 forest user groups in 10 countries, and a framed field experiment in a subset of sites, we find that collective land titling is associated with significantly higher levels of cooperative behavior including increased levels of trust, more frequent interpersonal interactions related to both forestry and nonforestry activities, more self‐governing institutions, and greater equality in resource extraction patterns. 

Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse. 

So­cial, bio­phys­i­cal, and in­sti­tu­tional con­texts af­fect for­est users’ in­cen­tives to work to­gether to re­store forests. With re­newed gov­ern­ment com­mit­ments to sup­port such ac­tiv­i­ties, we ar­gue that ef­fec­tive in­ter­ven­tions need to con­sider sev­eral con­text-spe­cific fac­tors – such as the user groups’ fu­ture dis­count rates, op­por­tu­nity costs, and col­lec­tive-ac­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties – be­cause these fac­tors will help de­ter­mine the ef­fec­tive­ness of such in­ter­ven­tions. To test the ef­fects of a suite of con­tex­tual fac­tors, we an­a­lyzed ob­ser­va­tions from 184 dif­fer­ent groups in 133 forests across eight de­vel­op­ing coun­tries. We find that the com­bi­na­tion of cer­tain en­abling fac­tors in­creases the prob­a­bil­ity of users un­der­tak­ing for­est im­prove­ment ac­tiv­i­ties, and that so­cial con­texts can con­di­tion the ef­fect of in­sti­tu­tional and bio­phys­i­cal con­texts. Our find­ings carry im­pli­ca­tions for the de­sign and im­ple­men­ta­tion of fu­ture in­ter­ven­tions to re­store forests in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries.