TY - JOUR
T1 - Robustness of norm-driven cooperation in the commons
AU - Schlüter, Maja
AU - Tavoni, Alessandro
AU - Levin, Simon
N1 - Funding Information:
M.S. acknowledges funding by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 283950 SES-LINK and a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre by Mistra. S.L. was supported by National Science Foundation grant nos. EF-1137894, DMS/1260/0955699, and GEO-1211972, and by FQEB grant no. RFP-12-14). A.T. is supported by the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, which is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/1/13
Y1 - 2016/1/13
N2 - Sustainable use of common-pool resources such as fish, water or forests depends on the cooperation of resource users that restrain their individual extraction to socially optimal levels. Empirical evidence has shown that under certain social and biophysical conditions, self-organized cooperation in the commons can evolve. Global change, however, may drastically alter these conditions. We assess the robustness of cooperation to environmental variability in a stylized model of a community that harvests a shared resource. Community members follow a norm of socially optimal resource extraction, which is enforced through social sanctioning. Our results indicate that both resource abundance and a small increase in resource variability can lead to collapse of cooperation observed in the no-variability case, while either scarcity or large variability have the potential to stabilize it. The combined effects of changes in amount and variability can reinforce or counteract each other depending on their size and the initial level of cooperation in the community. If two socially separate groups are ecologically connected through resource leakage, cooperation in one can destabilize the other. These findings provide insights into possible effects of global change and spatial connectivity, indicating that there is no simple answer as to their effects on cooperation and sustainable resource use.
AB - Sustainable use of common-pool resources such as fish, water or forests depends on the cooperation of resource users that restrain their individual extraction to socially optimal levels. Empirical evidence has shown that under certain social and biophysical conditions, self-organized cooperation in the commons can evolve. Global change, however, may drastically alter these conditions. We assess the robustness of cooperation to environmental variability in a stylized model of a community that harvests a shared resource. Community members follow a norm of socially optimal resource extraction, which is enforced through social sanctioning. Our results indicate that both resource abundance and a small increase in resource variability can lead to collapse of cooperation observed in the no-variability case, while either scarcity or large variability have the potential to stabilize it. The combined effects of changes in amount and variability can reinforce or counteract each other depending on their size and the initial level of cooperation in the community. If two socially separate groups are ecologically connected through resource leakage, cooperation in one can destabilize the other. These findings provide insights into possible effects of global change and spatial connectivity, indicating that there is no simple answer as to their effects on cooperation and sustainable resource use.
KW - Collapse
KW - Common-pool resource
KW - Cooperation
KW - Global change
KW - Norms
KW - Social-ecological system
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U2 - 10.1098/rspb.2015.2431
DO - 10.1098/rspb.2015.2431
M3 - Article
C2 - 26740611
AN - SCOPUS:84954515356
SN - 0962-8452
VL - 283
JO - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
JF - Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
IS - 1822
M1 - 20152431
ER -