Mark Lubell

Watershed Partnerships and the Emergence of Collective Action Institutions

This paper examines the emergence of local cooperative institutions--watershed partnerships-that resolve collective action problems involved in the management of natural resources. The political contracting approach to institutional supply suggests that watershed partnerships are more likely to emerge when potential benefits outweigh the transaction costs of developing and maintaining new institutions. We analyze the impact of social, political, economic, and ecological features of watersheds that affect benefits and transaction costs on the emergence of 958 watershed partnerships in the more than 2,100 watersheds in the United States. Our findings demonstrate that watershed partnerships are most likely to emerge in watersheds confronting severe pollution problems associated with agricultural and urban runoff, with low levels of command-and-control enforcement, and containing the resources to offset transaction costs.

Building Consensual Institutions: Networks and the National Estuary Program

Currently, many approaches to solving policy problems seek to create community-based, less coercive solutions that are creating the conditions for the birth of new regional governmental institutions. We argue that networks form the core of these emergent structures and that federal programs can play a positive role in developing local networks. Our empirical work compares networks in estuaries included in National Estuary Program with networks in comparable estuaries that were not. We find that the networks in NEP areas span more levels of government, integrate more experts into policy discussions, nurture stronger interpersonal ties between stakeholders, and create greater faith in the procedural fairness of local policy, thus laying the foundation for a new form of cooperative governance. A wide range of policy domains are characterized by political and administrative jurisdictions that are poorly suited for solving many emerging problems. This is particularly true in the area of environmental policy, where the physical boundaries of watersheds, airsheds, fishing grounds, and other natural systems typically cross local political and administrative boundaries. The need to deal with problems that transcend established governmental structures has intensified at the same time that the zeitgeist of American politics has increasingly spurned anything that smacks of “big government.” In turn, approaches that rely on hierarchical commandand-control are being replaced by policies that seek to create more community-based and less coercive solutions to policy problems. This has created the conditions for the birth of new regional governmental institutions that differ dramatically from traditional large-scale governmental organizations.

Environmental Activism as Collective Action

The literature on environmental activism has failed to produce a model of individual decision making explicitly linked to the logic of collective action. To remedy this problem, this article adapts the collective interest model developed by Finkel, Muller, and Opp to explain protest behavior and argues environmental activism is a function of citizen beliefs about collective benefits, the ability to influence collective outcomes, and the selective costs/benefits of participation. The author tests the hypotheses of the collective interest model using data from a survey of 460 residents of a coastal watershed and national data on 1,606 respondents from the 1993 General Social Survey Environment Battery. The author’s findings corroborate several central propositions of the collective interest model and provide a theoretical account of environmental activism that synthesizes many previous results.

Beyond existence and aiming outside the laboratory: estimating frequency-dependent and pay-off-biased social learning strategies

The existence of social learning has been confirmed in diverse taxa, from apes to guppies. In order to advance our understanding of the consequences of social transmission and evolution of behaviour, however, we require statistical tools that can distinguish among diverse social learning strategies. In this paper, we advance two main ideas. First, social learning is diverse, in the sense that individuals can take advantage of different kinds of information and combine them in different ways. Examining learning strategies for different information conditions illuminates the more detailed design of social learning. We construct and analyse an evolutionary model of diverse social learning heuristics, in order to generate predictions and illustrate the impact of design differences on an organisms fitness. Second, in order to eventually escape the laboratory and apply social learning models to natural behaviour, we require statistical methods that do not depend upon tight experimental control. Therefore, we examine strategic social learning in an experimental setting in which the social information itself is endogenous to the experimental group, as it is in natural settings. We develop statistical models for distinguishing among different strategic uses of social information. The experimental data strongly suggest that most participants employ a hierarchical strategy that uses both average observed pay-offs of options as well as frequency information, the same model predicted by our evolutionary analysis to dominate a wide range of conditions.

City Adoption of Environmentally Sustainable Policies in California's Central Valley

Problem: Sustainability remains “the current object of plannings fascination,” as Campbell described it in 1996, but it is unclear what causes local governments to adopt environmentally sustainable policies and whether they are effective once adopted. Purpose: The goal of this article is to explain why communities adopt environmentally sustainable policies. Methods: We develop an environmental policy sustainability index for 100 incorporated cities in Californias Central Valley using a combination of survey and archival data. We then use regression and cluster analyses to test which independent variables expressing three theoretical perspectives (Tiebouts public goods development model, Petersons fiscal capacity model, and Logan and Molotchs interest group/growth machine model) are best at explaining this index. Results and conclusions: The results suggest that sustainable policies are more likely to occur in cities with better fiscal health and whose residents are of higher socioeconomic status. These findings raise important questions about the relationship between developed and developing cities that were not raised in previous studies, which focused only on major metropolitan areas in the United States. Takeaway for practice: Our results suggest that small, less-developed cities will need substantial technical, financial, and planning assistance to move toward greater sustainability. Many medium-sized, more developed cities may also need technical assistance, but are otherwise capable of becoming more environmentally sustainable. Any new policies should not discourage the largest cities from continuing to pursue their current sustainability activities, but should pass the lessons they have learned along to smaller cities to help them change to more sustainable development trajectories. Research support: This research was supported by NSF Grant 0350817.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND CONSERVATION BY LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

In this article, the authors develop a political market framework to explain the circumstances under which Florid a counties will supply environmental public goods in the form of conservation amendments to county general plans. The framework emphasizes the role of local legislative and executive institutions as mediators of local policy change. Using count models and interaction terms, the analysis shows how the strength of real estate interests constrains the ability of professional county managers to pursue conservation policies. The findings reinforce the importance of developing theories of urban politics in which local political institutions are not transparent.

Adaptive Political Attitudes: Duty, Trust, and Fear as Monitors of Tax Policy

Theory: Attitudes toward collective obligations adapt in ways that enhance both individual and social well-being. A citizens trust and duty toward the collective and fear of retribution change in response to changes in costs or benefits associated with the collective. Compliance with collective obligations (e.g., paying taxes) varies with these attitudes, producing an unexploitable strategy capable of maintaining cooperative solutions despite the conflict between collective benefits and individual incentives to free-ride. Hypothesis: Citizens monitor the net benefits gained from collectives by altering their attitudes of trust, duty, and fear. Method: We analyze the natural experiment created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to estimate the impact of individual tax changes on attitudes of upper-income taxpayers, using tax returns and two waves of survey data from a national panel of 292 taxpayers. Findings: Trust, duty, and fear increase significantly when taxes decrease, and decrease when taxes increase, thereby adapting as predicted to changes in net benefits. The magnitude of change suggests a modest rate of adaptation that may enhance the stability of cooperative equilibria.

Familiarity Breeds Trust: Collective Action in a Policy Domain

Researchers are currently refining the concept and theory of trust to focus on identifying the bases of trust within specific domains. This paper examines the development of trust within the domain of agricultural water policy, where trust is a critical resource for solving collective action problems. The analysis uses data from a mail survey of farmers in agricultural water policy to integrate three theoretical frameworks: the conventional generalized trust perspective, Levis transaction cost theory of trust, and Sabatier and Jenkins-Smiths Advocacy Coalition Framework. The results demonstrate that while there is a close relationship between the attitude of trust and beliefs about the behavior of policy actors, the dynamics of trust within policy domains should be understood within the context of institutional structures and competing political values.

Collective Action, Environmental Activism, and Air Quality Policy

This article attempts to respond to Ostrom’s call for a behavioral model of collective action by generalizing the collective interest model of mass political action to explain citizen policy support and personal behavioral intentions in the context of air quality policy. The collective action problems inherent in air quality policy provide a critical research setting for testing hypotheses of the collective interest model. Key elements of the collective interest model—perceived risk, trust in policy elites, knowledge of the policy problem, and efficacy—are found to be directly, and positively, related to support of government policies and intentions to engage in personal behaviors that might improve air quality. The article discusses the implications for using the collective interest model as general behavioral theory of collective action.

Collaborative Institutions, Belief-Systems, and Perceived Policy Effectiveness

In this article I combine two existing policy theories, institutional rational choice and the Advocacy Coalition Framework, to explain actor perceptions of the effectiveness of public policies targeting common-pool resource dilemmas in coastal watersheds. Survey data from estuaries with and without the USEPA’s National Estuary Program provides evidence for two main hypotheses. First, perceived policy effectiveness is a function of “collective-action beliefs”: beliefs about situational variables that determine the benefits and transaction costs of collective action within the estuary action arena. Second, the effects of policy-core beliefs and institutional structure on perceived policy effectiveness are interdependent. In particular, governance institutions have a favorable effect on perceived policy effectiveness among political actors whose policy-core beliefs are congruent with the structure of the institution.