Beyond Collective Action Problems

Description

Human history is full of examples of continuously maintained shared infrastructure. Our ability to survive and prosper depends on cooperation at some level, from the irrigation systems that enabled ancient humans to abandon their nomadic lifestyle to the free and open-source software that undergirds the internet. Thus, understanding the conditions under which community governance can be both equitable and sustainable is of critical importance to scholars and policymakers alike.

In Beyond Collective Action Problems, Atul Pokharel argues that sustained cooperation depends on user perceptions that the cooperative arrangement is fair. Pokharel elaborates a different way to think about sustained cooperation over decades, based on a follow-up of 233 long-running community managed irrigation systems in Nepal—the same cases that were used to understand how groups can overcome collective action problems. Covering nearly forty years of history through these cases, Pokharel introduces the idea of fairness problems to capture the many forms in which the perceived fairness of a form of governance comes to matter to continued cooperation. As he shows, the longer individuals cooperate, the more they become aware of how far their cooperative arrangement has diverged from the initial promise of fairness. This perception of fairness affects their commitment to maintaining the shared resource and participating in the institutions for governing it.

Highlighting why eventually perceived fairness matters to sustained cooperation, this book illustrates how the fairness problem underlies successful cooperation over time, making it necessary to look beyond collective action problems.

About the author:

Atul Pokharel, currently at Yale University, was an Assistant Professor at the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He studies the political economy of infrastructure governance, and the community maintenance of shared physical and digital resources. His areas of expertise include Urban Governance, International Development Planning, and Political Economy. He focuses on the role of fairness in the community maintenance of infrastructure commons. His research interests include free and open-source software, and the "greening" of transportation systems in global cities. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and holds a Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT as well as a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Princeton University with a minor in Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Reviews

"Nobel prize winning Elinor Ostrom's study of farmer-managed irrigation systems in Nepal was the foundation of her famous theory of governance of the commons. With Ostrom's blessings and data, Atul Pokharel, whose own family played a pivotal role in these successful community-managed irrigation systems returns to them to compare how they have fared three decades later. What emerges is a gem of a book, a rare large scale, temporal study of shared resource management, as painstakingly researched as it is powerfully argued. A magisterial multi-methods research design allows Pokharel to develop a sophisticated theoretical framework that centers a novel factor-famers' perceptions of fairness. Pokharel's remarkable work is essential, accessible reading for scholars and practitioners of development alike." - Prerna Singh, Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Brown University

"Climate change has pushed us into a world where survival can depend on solving collective action problems. Atul Pokharel revisits Elinor Ostrom's classic study of collective action to explore why cooperation can fail" - even when cooperation is in everyone's self-interest. He draws on surveys interviews in the same systems in Nepal where Ostrom and her colleagues carried out their ground breaking work, and where Pokharel's own grandfather once led collective efforts by farmers. Pokharel argues that to keep from falling apart, solutions need to be perceived as fair, both narrowly and broadly, in ways that go beyond conventional ideas of a fair deal.

"Beyond Collective Action Problems is a major new contribution to our understanding of how societies resolve governance problems in the presence of externalities. Drawing on rich evidence from the experience of Nepali farmers in managing an important common pool resource for their livelihoods, Atul Pokharel argues that existing theories of how societies resolve collective action problems have missed a key element: the concern for fairness. When individuals believe that the governance system is fair, they are more likely to behave cooperatively, and the system survives in a self-sustaining fashion. The opposite is true when individuals believe the system is unfair. Pokharel develops a pathbreaking theory of unfairness aversion to explain these differences in behavior. The book is a must read for students across all of the behavioral sciences." - Avidit Acharya, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

"Atul Pokharel has shown once again that irrigation management is an ideal arena in which to study and understand collective action as a generic problem. The costs and benefits are very tangible, as is their distribution. His analysis with a time perspective of more than 30 years, combining quantitative and qualitative data, shows that sustained cooperation is a more significant phenomenon than just 'collective action' which formal game theory has usually framed as a one-off decision. Pokharel's focus on perceived fairness as a determining factor is consistent with my own experience introducing participatory irrigation management in Sri Lanka, Nepal and other countries. He elaborates usefully on Elinor Ostrom's consideration of equity, something that social scientists have mostly paid little attention to." - Norman Uphoff, Professor Emeritus of Government and International Agriculture, Department of Global Development, Cornell University

"For scholars as well as practitioners who care about community management of physical infrastructure, this book demonstrates, conclusively, that a sense of fairness in the way organizations operate is the key to their performance. This book takes forward the research by Elinor Ostrom, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, to a new height by showing that only community based organizations that distribute work load and resources fairly are sustainable in the long run. A must read for Political Economists and development planners who seek institutional understanding of success in developmental outcomes." - Bishwapriya Sanyal, Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning, MIT

"This pathbreaking, empirically grounded analysis of sustained cooperation makes a major contribution to public policy, economic development, and planning. Pokharel extends Ostrom's seminal research by showing how considerations of justice rival those of rationality for cooperation to endure." - John Forrester, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University

"Brilliant! Pokharel challenges the prevailing focus on the collective action problem in understanding sustained cooperation. A fresh perspective centered on the fairness question, the book provides valuable implications for scholars and policymakers interested in cooperation across diverse domains, from irrigation projects to free and open-source software. By transcending the notion of relying solely on local actions, this book offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of sustained cooperation, emphasizing the pivotal role of fairness as the solution." - Rajesh Veeraraghavan, Associate Professor of Science, Technology and International Affairs, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

"Atul Pokharel has given us a fresh approach to a bundle of vexing societal problems: cooperation, fairness, and governmental roles in promoting the public interest. The prose is engaging, the insights are profound, and the implications will ripple across a wide variety of communities of scholars and practitioners, from irrigation and farming to cities and digital infrastructure." - Andrew L. Russell, SUNY Polytechnic Institute

Table of contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Sustained Cooperation, Fairness Problems and Irrigation Systems
Chapter 2: What Affects Sustained Cooperation?
Chapter 3: Perceptions of Fairness
Chapter 4: Conceptions of Fairness
Chapter 5: The Fairness Problem
Chapter 6: Beyond Irrigation Systems and Physical Infrastructure
Appendix 1: Methods
Appendix 2: Expanded Results
References
Index