Games For Triggering Collective Change In Natural Resource Management A Conceptual Framework And Insights From Four Cases From India

Games for triggering collective change in natural resource management: A conceptual framework and insights from four cases from India

As resource users interact and impose externalities onto each other, institutions are needed to coordinate resource use, create trust, and provide incentives for sustainable management. Coordinated collective action can play a key role in enabling communities to manage natural resources more sustainably. But when such collective action is not present, what can be done to foster it? There is growing awareness that the governance of natural resources has to be adapted to the specific context. Interventions are often implemented at small scale, and the potential to scale up facilitation intensive approaches is limited. Moreover, sustainable resource management frequently fails to emerge or breaks down after the project ends. To date, researchers have typically used behavioral games to study cooperation patterns of communities. Recently, games have been adapted as learning and stakeholder engagement tools to improve management of the commons, strengthen self-regulation of resource use, and enhance constructive interactions among resource users. Combining games with other interventions and tools and facilitated discussions has been proposed as a promising approach to improve collective action institutions through experiential learning — a classic approach in education. This paper reviews existing literature and synthesizes lessons learned from a series of studies testing the use of behavioral games for institutional capacity development in India. We conclude that, while games alone will not be the solution to all natural resource management challenges games can provide a structured and therefore replicable approach for influencing behavior. They can also improve system understanding, raise awareness, influence norms, facilitate dialogue, train for crisis response, and increase legitimacy of decisions.

Games for Triggering Collective Change in Natural Resource Management

Norms, gender, and payment method affect extraction behavior in a framed field experiment on community forestry in India

This paper presents results from a framed field experiment in which participants make decisions about extraction of a common-pool resource, a community forest. The experiment was designed and piloted as both a research activity and an experiential learning intervention during 2017-2018 with 120 groups of resource users (split by gender) from 60 habitations in two Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. We examine whether local beliefs and norms about community forest, gender of participants, within-experiment treatments (non-communication, communication, and optional election of institutional arrangements (rules)) and remuneration methods affect harvest behaviour and groups’ tendency to cooperate. Furthermore, we explore whether the experiment and subsequent community debriefing had learning effects. Results reveal a “weak” Nash Equilibrium in which participants harvested substantially less than the Nash prediction even in the absence of communication, a phenomenon stronger for male than female participants in both states. For male groups in both states, both communication and optional rule election are associated with lower group harvest per round, as compared to the reference non-communication game. For female groups in both states, however, communication itself did not significantly slow down resource depletion; but the introduction of optional rule election did reduce harvest amounts. For both men and women in Andhra Pradesh and men in Rajasthan, incentivized payments to individual participants significantly lowered group harvest, relative to community flat payment, suggesting a possible “crowding-in” effect on pro-social norms. Despite the generally positive memory of the activity, reported actual changes are limited. This may be due to the lack of follow-up with the communities between the experiment and the revisit. The fact that many of the communities already have a good understanding of the importance of the relationships between (not) cutting trees and the ecosystem services from forests, with rules and strong internal norms against cutting that go beyond the felling of trees in the game, may have also meant that the game did not have as much to add. Findings have methodological and practical implications for designing behavioral intervention programs to improve common-pool resource governance.