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

本研究借助于进化博弈理论提出了灌溉管理集体行动的假设，并进行了实证验证。分析所需的数据来自云南省农村灌溉系统中国。农业普查也被用来分析日本。一项计量经济学分析显示，在一个农村社区将会采取集体行动，那里提供的非农就业机会很少，用水者之间的收入差距程度很小，资源限制也存在一定问题。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棱两可的，但存在着反向的U型关系。没有地方政府干预的社区表现优于有干预的社区，这一事实有力地支持了经常提出的观点，即政府或外部机构应将国家方案报告的很大一部分控制权下放给直接的利益攸关方。

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.