Panel 3.1. Collective Action Around Negative Externalities in Agroecosystems
co-Chairs: Landon Yoder1, Minwoo Ahn2, Courtney Hammond Wagner3, and Pranay Ranjan4
1Indiana University, 2University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 3USDA ARS, Burlington, VT, 4Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ
The role of collective action among farmers to curtail environmental problems has been under studied. The conventional wisdom to dealing with negative externalities, such as water quality degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, or biodiversity loss, is to use regulations, especially negative financial incentives, to discourage problematic practices. In agriculture, particularly in countries where production is heavily subsidized, regulations are usually limited in scope due to their political unpopularity with farmers. Recent farmer protests across multiple European countries in response to EU climate policies for agriculture illustrate the challenges of implementing regulations. Voluntary adoption of pro-environmental management practices has been the standard approach but has not generated substantial environmental improvements. In this panel, we will explore the role that collective action among farmers, as well as their interactions with relevant stakeholders, such as agricultural extension agents and government officials, has and could play in changing the status quo on environmental degradation in agroecosystems. We will look at how collective action around negative externalities may be different from canonical approaches in the commons literature and explore different dimensions of how collective action could complement or be incorporated into existing agricultural policy.
Monday, June 16, 2025 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Integrative Learning Center ILCS140
Collective Action Dilemmas in Agricultural Drainage and Irrigation Systems – a Property Rights Perspective
in-person
Pranay Ranjan1 and Vishal Narain2
1Northern Arizona University, USA, 2Management Development Institute Gurgaon, India
Property rights in natural resources and how they affect cooperation and collective action towards their sustainable management has been a key thread of scholarly inquiry for decades. However, a key knowledge gap is a comparison of different conceptual or theoretical approaches to the analysis of property rights. To fill this knowledge gap, we compare and contrast economic and legal anthropological approaches to property rights to present a comparative review of studies on water rights in drainage and irrigation systems. In particular, we review studies on water rights in relation to managing agricultural drainage systems in the Midwestern United States and water rights in relation to the warabandi irrigation system prevalent in North-West India. Our comparative review demonstrates that economic approaches to the analysis of property rights recognize the role of incentives in motivating or hindering collective action behaviors pertaining to natural resource management. In contrast, legal anthropological approaches to property rights recognize their different bases of legitimacy. Overall, we find that whereas economic approaches focus on the relationship between property rights structures, incentives, behaviors and outcomes, legal anthropological approaches focus on the co-existence of different systems of property rights with different bases of legitimacy and their relationship with each other. We conclude our review by presenting the implications of our findings for research and practice, including how our findings contribute to theorization of collective action.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Integrative Learning Center ILCS231
Land Tenure and Conservation on Working Lands: a Synthesis of Promises and Challenges
in-person
Pranay Ranjan
Northern Arizona University, USA
A large and growing proportion of working lands across the United States (US) are rented, thereby presenting a conservation decision-making context where agricultural landowners are not directly involved in farm operations. As a result, rental agreements involving non-operating landowners (NOLs) and tenant farmers (operators) are common across the US. Among others, existing research underscores the importance of balance of power between NOLs and operators, tenure (in)security, lease terms, information deficits and asymmetries, and trusted information sources in affecting conservation behavior on rented farmland. Recent scholarship also highlights the need to view land tenure as a multidimensional construct, and that to improve our understanding of how land tenure affects conservation behavior scholars need to operationalize these dimensions. Drawing upon insights from several US-focused papers published during the last six years, this talk will present a synthesis of promises and ongoing challenges associated with promoting conservation on rented working lands. In particular, the focus of this talk will be on cross-cutting themes that are applicable to forest-based livelihoods, including tenure security, power and gender dynamics, and theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of land tenure.
