Action around climate change poses perhaps the most daunting collective action problem for the commons. The issue transcends institutional boundaries, cuts across all scales of analysis (individual, community, nation, globe), and poses free rider problems encompassing multiple generations. The literature has proposed a number of institutional pathways for engendering collective action, including state-centered, market-based, and communitarian modes of organization. These institutional models trigger collective action through mechanisms involving individual rationality, social pressure, reciprocity, and others. However, in recent years, there has emerged another, underutilized pathway for collective action –relationality. Through social networks, connections across individuals and groups bring about pro-environmental action through mechanisms involving cognitive and emotional pathways (e.g., feeling empathy, caring for others). We will review, first, the conceptual basis for the relational model of collective action and, secondly, present a number of case studies that provide evidence for its activation in situations surrounding the climate commons.
Related References:
Brugnach et al. (2021). Relational quality and uncertainty in common pool water management. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 15188.
Lejano,R. (2023). Caring, Empathy, and the Commons. Cambridge University Press.
Ortiz-Riomalo,J.F. et al. (2021). Inducing perspective-taking for prosocial behaviour in natural resource management. JEEM, 110, 102513.
Participatory vision-building (PVB) seems promising in fostering collective action to overcome social dilemmas and attain socially desirable outcomes. By assisting the relevant actors in visualising their desired future and imagining how it would feel to be an active part, PVB can provide the necessary guidance, inspiration and motivation to galvanise collective action. Through a (pre-registered) framed lab-in-the-field economic experiment conducted with 728 farmers from Lake Tota, Colombia, we contribute to assessing whether PVB's causal impacts on collective action go beyond those of other elements of participatory processes that PVB also comprises, such as social interaction, information exchange and coordination around desirable strategies and outcomes. In a ‘lake game’, participants chose between two stylised farming practices over multiple hypothetical growing seasons, impacting their seasonal earnings and the water levels of a hypothetical lake as a shared resource. A subgroup of participants, randomly assigned to a PVB experimental condition, discussed and imagined a desired vision for the future. In this presentation, we discuss the potential of participatory approaches (such as the ‘lake game’ and the PVB treatment used in this study) to foster collective action, e.g. by raising awareness on social dilemmas, impacting relevant emotions such as inspiration, sadness and irritation and nurturing preferences for pro-social and pro-environmental action. We also indicate how future research could test the generalisability of our findings to other contexts, particularly those with heterogeneous interests, delve deeper into the underlying psychological mechanisms and explore the interplay of these aspects with other institutional mechanisms for sustaining collective action.
Addressing pressing social-environmental challenges requires the involvement and connection of interdependent actors with varying perspectives. Inducing perspective-taking can heighten other-regarding considerations and actions in favour of socially desirable outcomes in such situations. By encouraging decision-makers to consider broader perspectives, perspective-taking can foster concern for the well-being or expectations of others and/or for upholding personal and social norms. As a result, perspective-taking can compel prosocial behaviour. In this presentation, we draw on an extensive literature review and behavioural data obtained from fieldwork to explore how perspective-taking alters individuals' assessments of decision situations. Specifically, we examine how perspective-taking induces decision-makers to connect with, appreciate, and feel compelled to address others' needs when feasible and convenient (i.e., helping is within the realm of possibilities and not detrimental to their well-being). Our data comprises the behaviour of 206 farmers in a Peruvian watershed who learned through videos or field trips about the watershed's social and ecological conditions and interactions. A subset of these downstream farmers was asked to consider the perspectives of farmers living and working upstream while undertaking this learning activity.
