Title: The coevolution of renewable resources and informal institutions

Primary Researcher: Andries Richter
Email address: andries.richter@wur.nl
Submitted on: January 29, 2007

Start date: 15 August 2006
End date: 15 August 2010

Introduction:

Many case studies have shown that local communities are capable of managing natural renewable resources like fish, forests or grazing lands in a highly sustainable and profitable way by making informal agreements on the managing strategies. Unfortunately there are counterexamples in which communities fail to do so: Resources are depleted far too quickly leading to devastating ecological and economic consequences, a result that is often referred to as Tragedy of the Commons. Even more puzzling is the fact that communities switch sometimes out of a sudden from a sustainable and successful harvesting regime to an unsustainable and unsuccessful one.

It seems as if social norms play a crucial role in this process. How these norms evolve, how they change over time and how they influence individual’s behaviour is still not very well understood.

Aim:

1. Identifying the evolution of harvesting rules
Rules always evolve for a reason. It is therefore very likely that norms and rules are shaped by the state of the resource. Different types of resources demand different collective action and hence, different norms.

2. Identifying the transmission mechanisms of social norms
-How are social norms transmitted over time and spatially?
-Why do norms often degenerate so sudden?
-How resilient are certain norms against internal and external influences?

3.Role of legal law
Under what circumstances is the implementation of legal law complementary to social norms and when does it substitute them, leading to an inferior result?

Research:

Evidence from experimental economics and sociological field studies show that cooperative and pro-social behaviour is omnipresent in human society. Incorporating these findings into biological and economic theory is still a major challenge, since any new hypothesis should be consistent with natural selection and profit maximisation, which are the major paradigms of the two disciplines. Integrating insights from mathematics, biology and economics have shed light on this question, making it less puzzling today than it was years ago. The evolution of cooperation is of course more than a theoretical puzzle, as its understanding is a key premise for successful governmental policy. This holds especially for legislation concerning the management of common pool resources. Governmental policy that ignores local informal rules may be less effective, or worse, may lead to an outcome contrary to what was intended.
There is quite some variation to which degree individuals cooperate. It seems that cooperation varies much more between different societies than within a society. These findings strongly support the use of evolutionary models for explaining cooperation. Evolution has always been a story of adapting physical or behavioural traits to the local environment. Different environmental conditions should consequently lead to different behavioural traits, such as the degree of cooperation. Hence, looking more closely at the environment could be an important key for understanding the evolution of cooperation. My research will take these environmental aspects explicitly into account by combining the recent literature on cooperation with the renewable resource literature.
I am currently working on a differential equation model in which cooperation acts as a certain norm that is transmitted within a community. Feedback mechanisms between economic, natural and social capital will be taken into account.

Web page

http://www.biometris.wur.nl/UK/Staff/Andries+Richter/

Funding via NWO

Yes

External Funding Sponsors

This project is supported by the NWO Research Programme "Evolution & Behaviour"

Research Group

WUR - Mathematical and Statistical Methods