Resource regimes and cooperation

• Autores: Arild Vatn
• Localización: Land use policy: The International Journal Covering All Aspects of Land Use, ISSN 0264-8377, ISSN-e 1873-5754, Nº. 24, 2007, págs. 624-632
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The choice of resource regimes is a choice over the cost of transacting and the ability and willingness to cooperate. This paper argues that people may be willing to forgo individual gains for the sake of the common good. This depends, however, on the institutional context. Hence, it is argued that an important role of resource regimes is their capacity to define whether the issue is one of individual gain or cooperation. The paper builds its arguments on material from experiments in psychology and economics. They show that cooperative action dominates under certain institutional structures while individual gain is fostered in others. Moreover, studies of behavior in real-life institutional settings�e.g., of markets, common property regimes and public provisioning�support these findings. The lessons learned are finally used to introduce a discussion over the direction of institutional design being able to solve the growing problems of global environmental degradation.