Department of Social Sciences, Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), Bremen, Germany.
Department of Business & Economics, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany.
PLoS One. 2019 Jan 17;14(1):e0210561. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0210561. eCollection 2019.
Collective action of resource users is essential for sustainability. Yet, often user groups are socioculturally heterogeneous, which requires cooperation to be established across salient group boundaries. We explore the effect of this type of heterogeneity on resource extraction in lab-in-the-field Common Pool Resource (CPR) experiments in Zanzibar, Tanzania. We create heterogeneous groups by mixing fishers from two neighbouring fishing villages which have distinct social identities, a history of conflict and diverging resource use practices and institutions. Additionally, we analyse between-village differences in extraction behaviour in the heterogeneous setting to assess if out-group cooperation in a CPR dilemma is associated with a community's institutional scope in the economic realm (e.g., degree of market integration). We find no aggregate effect of heterogeneity on extraction. However, this is because fishers from the two villages behave differently in the heterogeneity treatment. We find support for the hypothesis that cooperation under sociocultural heterogeneity is higher for fishers from the village with larger institutional scope. In line with this explanation, cooperation under heterogeneity also correlates with a survey measure of individual fishers' radius of trust. We discuss implications for resource governance and collective action research.
资源使用者的集体行动对于可持续性至关重要。然而，用户群体通常在社会文化上具有异质性，这需要跨越明显的群体界限进行合作。我们在坦桑尼亚桑给巴尔的实地实验室共同池塘资源（CPR）实验中探索了这种异质性对资源开采的影响。我们通过混合两个相邻渔村的渔民来创建异质群体，这两个渔村具有不同的社会身份、冲突历史以及不同的资源使用实践和制度。此外，我们分析了在异质环境下村庄之间的提取行为差异，以评估在 CPR 困境中与社区在经济领域的制度范围（例如，市场一体化程度）相关的外群体合作。我们没有发现异质性对提取的总体影响。然而，这是因为两个村庄的渔民在异质处理中表现不同。我们支持这样一种假设，即社会文化异质性下的合作对于制度范围较大的村庄的渔民来说更高。与这一解释一致，异质性下的合作也与对个体渔民信任半径的调查衡量标准相关。我们讨论了对资源治理和集体行动研究的影响。
