Maria Claudia Lopez

Comparing the Effectiveness of Regulation and Pro‐Social Emotions to Enhance Cooperation: Experimental Evidence from Fishing Communities in Colombia

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.

Disturbance, Response, and Persistence in Self-Organized Forested Communities: Analysis of Robustness and Resilience in Five Communities in Southern Indiana

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 Ostroms 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.

Future directions in human-environment research.

Human-environment research in the 21st century will need to change in major ways. It will need to integrate the natural and the social sciences; it will need to engage stakeholders and citizens in the design of research and in the delivery of science for the benefit of society; it will need to address ethical and democratic goals; and it will need to address a myriad of important theoretical and methodological challenges that continue to impede progress in the advance of sustainability science.

Rules Compliance and Age: Experimental Evidence with Fishers from the Amazon River

We report the results of common-pool resource economic experiments conducted with indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon. The experiments recreate two contexts: a limited open access with no institutions regulating the fisheries and a nonmonetary external regulation that limits individual extraction when a fisher is found to be overextracting. We find that variables that did not explain behavior under limited open access do so under the regulatory institution. In particular, when the nonmonetary external regulation was introduced, we found a nonlinear significant effect of age on individual harvest. This result implies a negative relationship between age and individual extraction that reaches a peak around age 54. Our results suggest that in our sample, age groups react differently to an institution aimed to manage the fishery and open a discussion regarding the role of older fishers when a new regulation is introduced to manage natural resources. Their role could go beyond the dissemination of traditional knowledge and cultural systems since older fishers could be key actors in disseminating and adapting new institutions.

Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a popular strategy for environmental protection, and tropical forest conservation in particular. Little is known, however, about their effectiveness. Many argue that even if PES increase conservation while payments last, they may adversely affect other motivations for pro-environmental behaviour in the longer term. We test whether conditional payments also encourage forest users to conserve shared forest resources after payments end. Using a framed field experiment with 1,200 tropical forest users in five countries, we show that (1) during the intervention, conditional payments increased conservation behaviour; (2) after payments stopped, users continued to conserve more on average than they did before the intervention, especially when they were able to communicate with each other; and (3) trust amplified the lasting conservation effects of the interventions. PES effectiveness may increase when interventions facilitate interpersonal communication and when implemented in contexts where forest users enjoy high levels of trust.A framed field experiment in five countries shows that Payments for Ecosystem Services increase forest conservation, that communication contributes to payment effectiveness and that positive effects outlast payments.

Translating community narratives into semi-quantitative models to understand the dynamics of socio-environmental crises

Abstract Acute socio-environmental crises often expose systemic problems that are linked by failures in management, environmental, or social systems. If recovery efforts are to address these systemic problems, these issues and the concerns of those impacted by the crisis need to be clearly articulated, rationally represented, and communicated to those responsible for the recovery. Although participatory approaches to crisis recovery often use environmental modeling, explicit ways in which stakeholders’ narratives and experiences can be translated into computer-based models for scenario analysis are not readily available to modelers or decision-makers. We present an approach to translating community narratives about crisis events using a free Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping software called Mental Modeler ( www.mentalmodeler.org ). We applied this process to the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and demonstrate how participatory modeling can give communities a way to structure their thoughts, develop recovery actions, and communicate with those in charge of crisis recovery efforts.

An Experimental Study for Environmental Fundraising in Majorca, Spain

Purpose – This chapter tests the effectiveness of different institutions to fundraise for environmental projects at tourism destinations. Methodology – We conduct a series of experiments with tourists visiting the Island of Majorca, Spain, and test the fundraising capacity of a voluntary donation scheme, two tax levels, and a matching instrument. In the first treatment of our experiment, tourists have the opportunity to make a voluntary donation to a local environmental organization involved in environmental projects. In a high-tax and low-tax treatment, tourists are taxed some proportion of their initial endowment and then are allowed to make voluntary contributions from their remaining endowment. In a final treatment, the experimenters match, one-for-one, any voluntary donations. Findings – We test the crowding-out hypothesis of taxes over voluntary environmental donations and find imperfect crowding-out (from 60% to 65% for different tax levels).We also explore potential crowding-in of matching instruments (widely used in nontourism settings for fundraising campaigns), but do not find any support for it. Practical Implications – Our results support the conclusion that it would be reasonable to use voluntary donation programs and tourism taxes complementarily (instead of independently), to increase fundraising for environmental purposes at tourism destinations.

Determinants of adoption of sustainable production practices among smallholder coffee producers in Nicaragua

Efforts to slow down and eventually reverse the trend of climate change will take time, and in some cases, the negative impacts of climate change will be felt long before long-term solutions to this problem can bear fruit. Adaptation and mitigation strategies constitute the front line of attack for rural households in developing countries that rely on agricultural production and natural resource use as their main source of income and growth, and whose livelihoods are threatened by climate change. This study models the determinants of adoption of sustainable production practices by coffee producers in the department of Matagalpa, in northern Nicaragua. Using primary survey data, we analyze the extent to which cooperative membership impacts adoption of ten different practices. We find that coffee farmers who belong to cooperatives have adopted sustainable practices at higher rates than non-members, and that the odds of adoption are higher for members than for non-members. A factor analysis was conducted to determine the underlying structural differences between the ten practices, and from this analysis three factors emerged and were modeled. We find that cooperative membership is a significant determinant of practices that promote water conservation, yet not significant for practices that promote soil and plant health, nor for practices related to field management. These findings are valuable for policy makers, donors, and development and extension practitioners in the coffee sector, as they can better inform and guide policies toward more efficient and effective paths of long-term climate change adaptation.

Conservation of natural resources: Which matters - Having a regulation or the size of the penalty imposed?

In this chapter, I investigate through a public good in rural Colombia how different institutional arrangements, particularly different external regulations, with a common characteristic—an external regulator with a weak enforcement capacity—derive into different contributions and compliances. I tested two monetary regulations and found that high penalties very often do more harm than good. I also found that low penalties and public and private reminders were very effective at increasing cooperation and rule compliance.