SignificanceNorth American and European countries built many large dams until 1975, after which both started to abandon a significant part of their installed hydropower because of the negative social and environmental impacts. However, there has been a recent trend of new large hydropower dams being built in developing countries, particularly in megabiodiversity river basins, such as the Amazon, the Congo, and the Mekong. The socioeconomic and environmental damages in these river systems are even greater than the early costs in North America and Europe. This paper discusses how the hydropower sector needs to not only focus on energy production but also, include the negative social and environmental externalities caused by dams and recognize the unsustainability of current common practices.

We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems.

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This study uses data from 1,024 coffee producing households to address two critical questions regarding the role of cooperatives in Rwanda's coffee sector: Does cooperative membership increase adoption of best practices and coffee productivity? and do cooperatives improve farm household welfare? Using a propensity score matching technique to account for selection bias, we find that cooperatives are a critical institution for building farmer capacity, promoting adoption of improved technologies and inputs, and increasing productivity. We discuss the role that cooperatives can play in increasing farmer welfare and reestablishing the coffee sector as a pillar of growth in the country.

Abstract:This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The goal is to investigate the relative effectiveness of exogenous regulatory pressure and pro-social emotions in promoting cooperative behavior in a public goods context. The random public revelation of an individual's contribution and its consequences for the rest of the group leads to significantly higher public good contributions and social welfare than regulatory pressure, even under regulations that are designed to motivate fully efficient contributions.Keywords: public goods, field experiments, pro-social emotions, social dilemma, regulation, enforcement.