DRMS: Inequalities, Institutions and Sustainability: An Experimental Study of Local Efforts to Govern the Commons

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One of the longstanding challenges of community-based approaches to managing natural resources is that such approaches often lead to increases in social exclusion and economic inequality. The devolution of property rights over natural resources is an increasingly popular policy response to environmental degradation, especially in developing nations. One example of this trend is that local communities now collectively own and manage an increasing share (currently more than 15 percent) of the world's remaining forests. Several scholars have reported that local communities that own and manage their forests collectively often perform better than governments, at least when it comes to aggregate environmental conditions. Some scholars, however, are voicing concerns that when local resource users self-govern shared resources it often produces increased inequality: the risk that the management ends up benefiting mostly the relatively rich or privileged members of natural resource user groups, hence further marginalizing poorer members. This risk is a serious threat to the sustainability of community-based approaches, especially as there is mounting evidence that common-pool resources used by groups with relatively high degrees of economic inequality tend to have more degraded resource conditions. This research project investigates the conditions under which community-based governance approaches produce such inequalities, and the institutional arrangements that resource users may design and enforce to foster more equitable governance outcomes. This project addresses two types of decision making in natural resource governance processes. First, the research produces a deeper understanding of how local governance inequalities affect the decisions of disadvantaged households to participate in the group's governance activities, and the subsequent effects of those decisions on resource sustainability. Second, by examining the effects of different institutional arrangements on who benefits from resource management activities, the research produces new knowledge about approaches to address the negative effects of inequality in forest user groups. Specifically, the researchers examine community forest management groups in Nepal and India and focus on three questions: how do inequalities influence collective action? How does inequality influence the distribution of benefits and sustainability? What interventions reduce inequality? The four hypotheses are: interventions to decrease inequality de facto can increase participation in decision making; will motivate greater time investments in resource management; will increase benefits of the commons going to disadvantaged households, and will achieve improved environmental outcomes. The team evaluates the hypotheses through four randomized controlled trials each of which uses three inequality reducing interventions. The villages are selected using matched-pair cluster-randomization with an N of 360 villages which makes for 60 villages per experimental condition per country. There is also an ethnographic case study in eight villages. The interventions are: creation of a subcommittee for low-caste and tribal groups, a subcommittee plus training for high-caste and male citizens on the value of inclusiveness, and both of these plus a subcommittee for women. Because Nepal has committee membership quotas for women but not by caste the treatments are slightly modified. Pre- and post-treatment household surveys measure both participation in the planning group activities and resource use, and are be supplemented with satellite imagery.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.