Collective action for local commons management: A comparative study of Japan and China

本文运用进化博弈论的方法，提出了关于灌溉治理集体行动的假设，并进行了实证验证。分析数据由作者从中国云南农村灌溉系统中收集。农业普查也被用于日本的分析。一项计量经济学分析表明，在一个几乎没有非农业就业机会、用水者之间的收入差距很小、资源限制问题不大的农村社区，将会采取集体行动。此外，在我们的理论模型中，群体规模和集体行动之间的关系是模糊的，但存在一个反向的“u型”关系。没有地方政府干预的社区表现优于有地方政府干预的社区，这一事实有力地支持了一种经常被提出的观点，即政府或外部机构应将cpr控制权的很大一部分委托给直接利益相关者。

This research presents hypotheses regarding collective actions for irrigation management, with the help of evolutionary game theory, and verifies them empirically. Data for the analysis was collected by the author from the irrigation system of rural Yunnan, China. The agricultural Census was also used for the analysis of Japan. An econometric analysis reveals that collective action will be forthcoming in a rural community where few non-farm job opportunities are provided, the degree of income disparity among water users is quite small, and resource restrictions are moderately problematic. Also, the relationship between group size and collective action is ambiguously determined in our theoretical model, but there exists an inverse "U-shape" relationship. The fact that communities without local government intervention outperform those with intervention lends strong support to the frequently voiced view that governments or external agencies should delegate significant parts of the control rights of CPRs to immediate stakeholders.