Sergio Villamayor-Tomas

Supernatural monitoring and sanctioning in community-based resource management

Cooperation in human societies is difficult to sustain if mechanisms are not in place to monitor behavior and sanction transgressions. Unfortunately, these mechanisms constitute second-order public goods that are vulnerable to freeriding. Religion has been proposed to solve this problem by shifting these burdens to the realm of the supernatural. However, very little research has been done to examine the specific content of beliefs in supernatural monitoring and sanctions within real world cooperative contexts. To help fill this void and to better understand the role these institutions may have played in the development of prosociality, we performed a meta-analysis of case studies (N = 48) in which religion played some role in community-based resource management (CBRM). Our findings suggest that beliefs in supernatural enforcement are common features of CBRM and that these duties are ascribed to entities ranging from ancestral spirits to gods. The specific sanctions believed to be imposed for violating rules are varied, but most often represent common occurrences that are readily open to interpretation as indications of supernatural efficacy. We propose that the provincial quality of the supernatural entities associated with CBRM may limit the scale at which they can promote prosociality and we discuss the implications this may have for the evolution of high gods.

Linking classroom learning and research to advance ideas about social-ecological resilience

There is an increasing demand in higher education institutions for training in complex environmental problems. Such training requires a careful mix of conventional methods and innovative solutions, ...

Adaptive Irrigation Management in Drought Contexts: Institutional Robustness and Cooperation in the Riegos del Alto Aragon Project (Spain)

This chapter aims to understand the ability of more than 10,000 farmers in a large irrigation project to cooperate and adjust their water demands to cope with droughts. Causal inferences are formulated with the aid of common pool resource (CPR) theory as well as qualitative and quantitative evidence. According to the analysis, a series of robust water management institutions as well as additional land use factors contribute to the collective adaptation of farmers in drought conditions. Water management institutions include a flexible common property regime, effective environmental and social monitoring mechanisms, and decentralized administrative leadership. Land use factors include the existence of a moderate heterogeneity of farmers in their dependence from irrigated agriculture, the relatively substitutability of high and low water demand crops and a strong mechanism of government-sponsored income support subsidies. Overall, the analysis illustrates the interest of understanding adaptation from the perspective of CPR theory, as well as the usefulness of integrating the study of water and land use dynamics to understand sustainable management in the irrigation sector.

Introduction to the special issue on adapting institutions to climate change

This article introduces the special issue on climate adaptation and institutions. Economic accounts of climate adaptation have stressed its collective action nature and the limitations of standard economic approaches to the matter. Governance accounts, on their part, have shown that adaptation does not always happen when it is expected. Against this background, institutional economics has the potential to shed light on those societal processes and collective mechanisms leading to and shaping adaptation (or the absence of it). The selection of articles contributing to this special issue shows that climate adaptation can indeed be explored successfully through institutional economics, and that doing so fits well within the institutional economics agenda. Some recommendations for future research are provided at the end.