Field experiments on irrigation dilemmas

Janssen, Marco A.; Bousquet, François; Cárdenas, Juan Camilo; Castillo, Daniel; Worrapimphong, Kobchai

doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2012.03.004

Cited by 59 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…In earlier experiments we have shown that participants are able to overcome the irrigation dilemma in experimental settings [7,8]. A key explanatory factor for these findings is the trust that participants have in other community members, and the reduction of investments by tailenders to match to unequal allocation of the water consistent with Ostrom's second institutional design principle that requires a good fit between appropriation and provision rules and the local context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

The effect of information in a behavioral irrigation experiment

Janssen

Anderies

Legáz

et al. 2015

Water Resources and Economics

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Abstract:When governing shared resources, the level and quality of information available to resource users on the actions of others and the state of the environment may have a critical effect on the performance of groups. In the work presented here, we find that lower availability of information does not affect the average performance of the group in terms of their capacity to provide public infrastructure and govern resource use, but it affects the distribution of earnings and the ability to cope with disturbances. We performed behavioral experiments that mimic irrigation dilemmas in which participants need to maintain infrastructure function in order to generate revenue from the use of water. In the experimental design, there is an upstream-downstream asymmetry of access to water that may lead to unequal access to water. We find that inequality of investment in irrigation infrastructure and water appropriation across players is more pronounced in experiments where resource users have limited information about the actions of others. We also find that inequality is linked to the ability of groups to cope with disturbances. Hence a reduced level of information indirectly reduces the adaptive capacity of groups.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

The effect of information in a behavioral irrigation experiment

Janssen

Anderies

Legáz

et al. 2015

Water Resources and Economics

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“…Those using communication both to agree on a joint investment strategy and to choose their own sanctioning system achieve results close to the group's optimum ( [28], see also [29]). Field studies have illustrated how institutional rules, designed by resource users themselves, allow for the self-organized management of irrigation [5,30,31], fishing and harvesting systems [13]. For example, in the Spanish huerta irrigation systems, institutional rules specify how much water each user may take at a given time, how responsibilities for maintenance of the system are shared and what the sanctions are for individuals who break the rules.…”

Section: (B) the Benefits Of Institutionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

Powers

Schaik

Lehmann

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 18 to a theme issue 'The evolution of cooperation based on direct fitness benefits'. What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this transition. By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default 'Hobbesian' rules of the 'game of life', determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter-gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders. Successful institutions create rules of interaction that are self-enforcing, providing direct benefits both to individuals that follow them, and to individuals that sanction rule breakers. Forming institutions requires shared intentionality, language and other cognitive abilities largely absent in other primates. We explain how cooperative breeding likely selected for these abilities early in the Homo lineage. This allowed anatomically modern humans to create institutions that transformed the selfreliance of our primate ancestors into the division of labour of large-scale human social organization.

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“…Thus, biophysical contexts that generate situations in which participants appropriate from the common resource sequentially will lead to inequality in the rates of resource extraction across participants (Janssen et al 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordination and cooperation in asymmetric commons dilemmas

2011

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In this paper we discuss laboratory experiments that address the problem of self-governance in an asymmetric commons dilemma. Small-scale irrigation systems that provide food for hundreds of millions of people around the world are probably the most common example of such dilemmas. Here, we formulate an abstract dilemma in which subjects make both a decision about investment in the provision of infrastructure associated with the use of a resource and about how much to extract from the common-pool resource made available by this infrastructure. The impact of inherent asymmetry in irrigation systems on the provision of a resource and the impact of communication on the capacity of the group to solve the two-level commons dilemma of cooperation and coordination based on the analysis of the experimental data are discussed.

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Field experiments on irrigation dilemmas

Cited by 59 publications

References 18 publications

The effect of information in a behavioral irrigation experiment

The effect of information in a behavioral irrigation experiment

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

Coordination and cooperation in asymmetric commons dilemmas

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