SignificanceNorth American and European countries built many large dams until 1975, after which both started to abandon a significant part of their installed hydropower because of the negative social and environmental impacts. However, there has been a recent trend of new large hydropower dams being built in developing countries, particularly in megabiodiversity river basins, such as the Amazon, the Congo, and the Mekong. The socioeconomic and environmental damages in these river systems are even greater than the early costs in North America and Europe. This paper discusses how the hydropower sector needs to not only focus on energy production but also, include the negative social and environmental externalities caused by dams and recognize the unsustainability of current common practices.

We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems.

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This study uses data from 1,024 coffee producing households to address two critical questions regarding the role of cooperatives in Rwanda's coffee sector: Does cooperative membership increase adoption of best practices and coffee productivity? and do cooperatives improve farm household welfare? Using a propensity score matching technique to account for selection bias, we find that cooperatives are a critical institution for building farmer capacity, promoting adoption of improved technologies and inputs, and increasing productivity. We discuss the role that cooperatives can play in increasing farmer welfare and reestablishing the coffee sector as a pillar of growth in the country.

Abstract:This paper presents the results from a series of framed field experiments conducted in fishing communities off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The goal is to investigate the relative effectiveness of exogenous regulatory pressure and pro-social emotions in promoting cooperative behavior in a public goods context. The random public revelation of an individual's contribution and its consequences for the rest of the group leads to significantly higher public good contributions and social welfare than regulatory pressure, even under regulations that are designed to motivate fully efficient contributions.Keywords: public goods, field experiments, pro-social emotions, social dilemma, regulation, enforcement.

In this article, we use a new game-based tool to evaluate the immediate and longer term behavioral change potential of three different payments for ecosystem services (PES) delivery mechanisms: direct payments for individual performance, direct payments for group performance, and insurance. Results from four rural shifting-cultivation dependent communities in Lao PDR suggest that easily understood group-oriented incentives yield the greatest immediate resource-use reduction and experience less free-riding. Group-based incentives may succeed because they motivate participants to communicate about strategies and coordinate their actions and are perceived as fair. No incentive had a lasting effect after it ceased, but neither did any crowd out the participants' baseline behavior. Temporary reductions in resource dependence may provide a buffer for development of new livelihoods and longer term change. Games like the one developed here can help policy makers appropriately target environmental incentive programs to local contexts and teach program participants how incentive schemes work.

It is well proven that communication enhances cooperation in public goods and commonpool resource experiments. It is less well understood why and how communication affects cooperative behavior and whether that impact is mediated by the sharing of a common context and the individuals' every day experiences. This paper aims to close this gap by means of a systematic content analysis of communication transcripts from field experiments. The paper analyzes communication statements shared by participants in a series of common-pool resource experiments conducted in rural Colombia. We first classified each statement under two categories: topic and function. Then, we tested hypotheses about the impact of those statements on cooperation depending on (1) their reference to the "field context" and other topic categories; and (2) the "informational", "disapproval", or "group solidarity" function of the statements. According to our results, statements that contain references to the context affect cooperation depending on the function of those statements. When the statements fulfill an information role, the effect is negative, but when statements have the function of enhancing group solidarity, the effect is positive. The statements that have the strongest positive impact on cooperation are those fulfilling a disapproval function, particularly when the topic of the messages are the payoffs obtained by the group.

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