Rivera, Maria Ignacia

Game experiments are valuable for studying cooperation in natural resource use, but their utility depends on reflecting field outcomes (i.e., external validity). Researchers aim to enhance external validity by increasing the games’ resemblance to decisions made in the field (i.e., ecological validity). However, the effectiveness of this practice remains untested. We conducted an experiment with Chilean fishing communities known to differ in cooperation levels when managing coastal resources. We assessed how using a contextual frame and enabling peer enforcement to mirror field actions affected a common-pool resource game’s ability to replicate these differences. The contextual frame improved external validity by replicating field differences. While peer enforcement alone did not replicate these differences, its combination with a contextual frame revealed variations across communities in using punishment and sustaining cooperation. These results underscore the value of designing contextualized games to enhance our understanding of cooperation and effectively guide management and conservation.

Co-management is a crucial strategy for balancing local communities’ access to natural
resources with sustainable development and conservation goals. Despite widespread
recognition of co-management’s importance, understanding of its endurance remains limited,
constraining the design of initiatives that can be appropriately scaled and sustained over
time. This paper aims to advance theoretical and empirical work on co-management by
deepening the discussion on how different sets of social-ecological features or configurations
support co-management survival. We provide a national-scale empirical evaluation of
conditions for co-management survival, using Chile’s Territorial User Rights for Fishing (TURF)
policy as a learning platform. Guided by collective action theory within social-ecological
systems, we applied interpretable cluster analysis to 750 TURFs established over two decades,
identifying distinct configurations for collective action. We then employed survival analysis
to examine differences in TURF survival across these configurations. High survival rates
were observed in social-ecological configurations with high initial resource abundance.
However, configurations with lower initial abundance achieved similarly high survival rates
when characterized by high resource dependency, proximity to regional markets, and lower
surveillance costs. Our findings suggest that focusing on single determinants for assessing
co-management survival may not be a fruitful way forward. Instead, emphasis on different
social-ecologicalconfigurations, context-based interpretations, and the dynamic incentives
faced by participants can offer actionable insights for ensuring enduring co-management
outcomes.