Session 9. 4.

Inequalities in common-pool resource scenarios and other social dilemmas have received considerable attention from researchers and policymakers. Potential remedies for these inequalities, however, are not well-understood. This study theorizes about the effects of information about inequality on resource users’ decisions, and on downstream outcomes such as whether inequality worsens or improves over time. We argue that the effects of information-based interventions depend upon the ways in which the information is framed, and also on who receives the information (e.g., advantaged resource users versus disadvantaged resource users). We use a framed groundwater game to test our theoretical expectations. The game assigned players’ costs of groundwater extraction at random, generating differential advantages for players within the same group. We also randomly assigned information about inequality. Some players were given information about inequality with a framing meant to prime pro-social motivations, other players were given information about inequality with a framing intended to prime self-interested motivations, and both groups were compared to a pure control group that was given no information about inequality. The experimental results suggest that framing conditions the effects of information on resource users’ decisions, and that policy interventions designed to address inequality through information may have unexpected effects without careful attention to framing or who the recipients of the information are.

This paper examines the role of inequality in shaping perceptions of fairness of different conservation mechanisms. Agent heterogeneity and inequality have been recognized as an important element influencing collective action in environmental conservation contexts, as well as the effectiveness of institutional settings that seek to promote it. In unequal settings, fairness considerations have been shown to influence people’s behavior, but less attention has been paid to the specific mechanisms through which inequality can, in fact, affect fairness perceptions of the policies that promote environmental conservation. We utilized a multi-country CPR framed field experiment (FFE) implemented in Peru, Brazil, and Indonesia, framed as a linear public good game with forest extraction, where participants could make land use change decisions over multiple rounds. We exploit an inequality treatment introduced as differences in deforestation capacity—or the maximum number of forest plots that a participant could convert to agricultural land. In this context, the FFE included different institutional settings to reduce free-riding, or over-conversion of land use, including external government enforcement and peer enforcement. We use data from this experiment to examine equity perceptions of government and peer enforcement, and to assess differences in those equity perceptions between advantaged resource users (those with high deforestation capacity) and disadvantaged resource users (those with low deforestation capacity).

The inclusion of women in environmental decision-making is widely believed to improve conservation outcomes and can be considered normatively desirable independent of outcomes. Gender quotas have been proposed as a policy intervention to ensure descriptive representation of women. In Nepal, Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) manage more than a third of forested land under the country’s community forestry program, which is regarded as a model forestry decentralization policy. Current governmental guidelines set a target of 50% women on the executive committee of these groups, though this target has not been fully achieved to date. One possible effect of a gender quota for executive committee membership is that the representation of women in leadership may motivate more people (perhaps especially other women) to participate in the CFUG more broadly. This study uses an original survey experiment framed around community-based forest management that was administered to survey respondents in 100 villages in rural Nepal (N = 1,243). The survey experiment exposed respondents to a vignette describing a hypothetical CFUG in the respondent’s village, which was randomly varied with respect to the number of women required to be included on the ten-member executive committee. This was followed by survey questions that asked respondents whether they would engage in a number of participation activities if the group existed in their village. We find that having more seats reserved for women on the executive council leads to a statistically significant increase in the probability that female respondents report being likely to join the group, and it also increases their likelihood of attending meetings. Furthermore, our results suggest that more women on the executive committee predicts a higher probability of ‘active’ participation’—joining the institution, attending a meeting, and speaking up at the meeting—among women respondents. Our findings suggest that gender quotas requiring the presence of a women in leadership roles can induce other women to engage more actively in community-based forest management, without discouraging participation among men.

Inequalities among community members can influence the effectiveness of interventions intending to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, even when the forested areas are managed collectively. In particular, differences in the baseline capacity to secure out-of-farm sources of income or sustainable productive systems may limit the perceived benefits of program incentives to conserve the forests or exacerbate the costs of disincentives like fees. To assess the degree to which inequalities have a meaningful impact on the effectiveness of different intervention strategies, we implemented a framed field experiment (FFE) in Peru and Brazil, combined with detailed household data about different sources of inequality, including income, and productive capacity. With the FFE, we compared three strategies to reduce the free rider problem in a collective PES program: (i) Public monitoring of individual deforestation, (ii) monitoring with peer sanctions (community enforcement), and (iii) monitoring with external sanctions (government enforcement). We implemented these different strategies in a context of wealth inequality, framed as differences in deforestation capacity. This setting thus allows us to consider the combined effect of “real-life” as well as “induced” inequalities in the context of the framed experiment. The preliminary findings show that wealthier participants (in the FFE) with high deforestation capacity tended to be more responsive to (the threat of) sanctions than their poorer counterparts. This effect was reinforced with real-life wealth conditions, thus wealthier participants both in the game and in real life showed higher favorability to advantageous inequality. This finding suggests that baseline inequality has important implications for PES design, considering that the mechanisms included to promote conservation may need to be tailored to subgroups of wealth within the intervened communities to improve effectiveness.