Papers in this panel question assumptions about the nature of goods and social dilemmas in commons. They explore how variations in interdependence may influence environmental governance. Rather than intrinsic, dichotomous, or fixed types of goods; variation in uses, users, and interdependence, and how institutions deal with these, can shape the excludability, subtractability, and indivisibility of environmental goods and the potential for conflict and cooperation. Rather than a few symmetric static social dilemmas, interdependence may be better understood as diverse, dynamic, mostly asymmetric, and involving various forms of power. Unpacking the complexity of power in social-ecological systems requires going beyond typical social dilemma models to develop a better typology of how power influences the dynamics and outcomes of social-ecological systems, and their governability. This panel will invite participant questions and present brief provocations to stimulate conversations about going beyond conventional conceptions of commons to better understand environmental governance in contexts of heterogeneous interests, asymmetric situations, and power dynamics. Additional paper proposals related to the panel topics are invited and the scope of the abstract and panel session may be adjusted accordingly.
Unequal opportunities and outcomes are pervasive in commons, but conceptualization of social dilemmas in commons has typically focused on symmetric models of tragedy of the commons and prisoner’s dilemma. This paper looks at opportunities for agency in asymmetric contexts of structural advantage and disadvantage through the lens of simple game theory models of interdependent decision making in strategic situations.
Changes in the ranking of outcomes map transformations between different models of two-person two-choice situations (2x2 games) such as changing a symmetric prisoner’s dilemma into an asymmetric dilemma or a stag hunt game. Mapping the payoff space of such transformations shows that the vast majority of possible games are asymmetric. Asymmetric games with a single equilibrium with unequal outcomes make up almost half of the possible 2x2 games, but models of such situations have received little attention in social science research on environmental governance.
These asymmetric games of advantage and disadvantage illustrate how structural characteristics, such as alignment of dominant strategies, presence of alternative non-equilibrium outcomes, and pathways for transformation, shape the limits and opportunities for agency, including potential for agreements and institutional arrangements that could change situations to achieve better outcomes in terms of various criteria. In the context of the prevalence of asymmetric situations with unequal equilibrium solutions, this paper analyzes factors that may influence attempts to achieve better outcomes, including the role of threats, spite, care, persuasion, attitudes about fairness, availability of equitable alternatives, negotiations that link action situations, and sometimes difficult individual or collective decisions concerning exit, voice, loyalty, and fairness.
Keywords: asymmetric social situations, collective agency, periodic table of interdependence, suasion games, rambo games, topology of 2x2 games, unequal commons
Getting a group to adopt cooperative norms is an enduring challenge. Such cooperation is even harder for groups that interact across multiple environments. Groups of strangers often have to attain cooperative outcomes across a range of environments. We introduce a laboratory setting to test if groups can guide themselves to cooperative outcomes by manipulating the environmental parameters that shape their own emergent cooperation process. We test for cooperation in a set of games that impose different social dilemmas. These games vary in stability, efficiency, "alignment", and fairness. By offering agency over behavior along with second-order agency over the rules of the game, we understand emergent cooperation in naturalistic settings in which the rules of the game are themselves dynamic. The literature on transfer learning in games suggest that interactions between features are important and might aid or hinder the transfer of cooperative learning to new settings.
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