Pervasive overuse and degradation of common pool resources (CPRs) is a global concern. To sustainably manage CPRs, effective governance institutions are essential. A large literature has developed to describe the institutional design features employed by communities that successfully manage their CPRs. Yet, these designs remain far from universally adopted. We focus on one prominent institutional design feature, community monitoring, and ask whether nongovernmental organizations or governments can facilitate its adoption and whether adoption of monitoring affects CPR use. To answer these questions, we implemented randomized controlled trials in six countries. The harmonized trials randomly assigned the introduction of community monitoring to 400 communities, with data collection in an additional 347 control communities. Most of the 400 communities adopted regular monitoring practices over the course of a year. In a meta-analysis of the experimental results from the six sites, we find that the community monitoring reduced CPR use and increased user satisfaction and knowledge by modest amounts. Our findings demonstrate that community monitoring can improve CPR management in disparate contexts, even when monitoring is externally initiated rather than homegrown. These findings provide guidance for the design of future programs and policies intended to develop monitoring capabilities in communities. Furthermore, our harmonized, multisite trial provides sustainability science with a new way to study the complexity of socioecological systems and builds generalizable insights about how to improve CPR management.
This article investigates the impact of the world price of a “lootable,” labor-intensive natural resource on intensity of violent conflict. Results suggest that a price increase can have opposite effects at different geographical levels of analysis: a decrease in conflict intensity overall in resource-rich countries, but an increase in conflict intensity in resource-rich subnational regions. The article argues that intensity of violence decreases overall due to rising opportunity costs of rebellion but that violence concentrates in resource-rich areas as returns to looting rise. The article introduces a new measure of diamond propensity based on geological characteristics, which is arguably exogenous to conflict and can capture small-scale labor-intensive production better than existing measures. The stated effects are found for secondary diamonds, which are lootable and related to opportunity costs of fighting, but not for primary diamonds, which are neither.
This paper investigates how counterterrorism targeting terrorist leaders affects terrorist attacks. This effect is theoretically ambiguous and depends on whether terrorist groups are modeled as unitary actors or not. The paper exploits a natural experiment provided by strikes by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) “hitting” and “missing” terrorist leaders in Pakistan. Results suggest that terrorist groups increase the number of attacks they commit after a drone “hit” on their leader compared with after a “miss.” This increase is statistically significant for 3 out of 6 months after a hit, when it ranges between 47.7% and 70.3%. Additional analysis of heterogenous effects across groups and leaders, and the impact of drone hits on the type of attack, terrorist group infighting, and splintering, suggest that principal-agent problems—(new) terrorist leaders struggling to control and discipline their operatives—account for these results better than alternative theoretical explanations.
This article reviews the literature on the relationship between natural resource abundance and civil conflict, focusing on cross-country, quantitative research. It concludes that results on natural resources (as a single category) as a cause of conflict onset are quite unstable. A more robust relationship is found looking at specific resources, notably oil and diamonds. Resource abundance potentially increases conflict risk by providing revenue to warring parties, decreasing the cost of rebellion, increasing the 'value' of winning the government or decreasing government quality and economic growth. However, there is little consensus on which (combination of) mechanism(s) is most important, even though this is the most interesting question for policy makers.
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