Deutscher Tropentag 2005 Stuttgart-Hohenheim, October 11-13, 2005 Conference on International Agricultural Research for Development Efficiency or Fairness? Strategies, Conflicts, and Dynamics in the Commons as Reaction Towards Increasing Pressure from Globalization Vollan a, Bjørn, Bernadette Bock a and Michael Kirk a a Universität Marburg, Institut für Kooperation in Entwicklungsländern, Am Plan 2, 35032 Marburg, Germany. Email vollan@wiwi.uni-marburg.de. Introduction Globalization has been accompanied by an equally global tendency towards devolution of authority and resources from nation-states to regions and communities. Decentralization and devolution in developing countries is said to enhance effectiveness of policies and public service delivery, to increase equity and to sustain natural resources (Ribot 2003). It is rooted in notions like social capital and community-based development. Participatory measures, like the creation of user groups or the holding of meetings are likewise practiced for all policy objectives from public service delivery to conservation of natural resources. This paper explores the relationship between the numerous, uncoordinated measures taken in some villages of Namaqualand, South Africa. Based on an empirical study, it discusses how the distribution of payments for public work via village committees rewards individualistic, short-sighted, free-riding behavior of villagers, which contrasts the moral-based, long-term commitment needed for natural resource conservation. Most collective actions do not emerge spontaneously. Most often, they are initiated by government bodies or NGOs. These collective actions are identical in their structures, as they are based on the creation of committees and the holding of numerous village meetings. However, they are very different in their aims and underlying assumptions concerning human motivation to act. On the one hand, government officials or municipalities aim to increase the public service delivery and simultaneously help to overcome unemployment and poverty with short-term working contracts. This 'incentive based' collective action describes work that a committee has allocated to an individual out of a larger pool of needy people to fulfill the construction work for houses, fencing, or water and electricity pipelines. On the other hand, NGOs or donors try to set up gardening, tourism, health, crime prevention or other projects, trying to raise awareness for conservation, HIV or village democracy and are primarily based on the 'voluntary' action of a collective and incurring benefits for the whole group in the long run. The success of these moralbased institutions will depend on the long-term commitment of the group or committee towards these aims and the sanctioning of people inside the group deviating from the cooperative solution. Both approaches are undisputable in their importance, both for the local people and the society, but they are very difficult to achieve simultaneously in a common-pool resource system, due to the embeddedness (Peters 1987) of the actors and the social learning processes of successful strategies. Embeddedness describes the interdependence among different institutional and ecological subsystems. Resource users interact with a complex and fragile ecosystem, their infrastructure, each other, with local governments and NGOs on a daily basis in order to sustain their livelihoods. People take part in village life, which is characterized by many different groups
and cross-memberships. The experiences people make in one group will certainly influence their behavior in another. Therefore, the examination of collective actions for resource management has to take into account the broader socio-political and historical environment. Short description of the study site Namaqualand, the study area, is a winter-rainfall desert of some 50.000 km 2, located in the northwestern part of South Africa (see figure 1 in appendix). A selective regime with highly predictable rainfall and moderate temperatures is responsible for the unique plant ecological features of Namaqualand. Therefore, this area has been recognized as the earth's only arid hotspot of biodiversity, placing it among the 25 most ecologically valuable spaces in the world. As often, human needs and political pressures are in conflict with such conservation measures. In Namaqualand, six former colored rural reserves make up more than a quarter of the land and is home and resource base to a majority of the rural population. Many of the villagers are unemployed and rely on state pensions and welfare grants or remittances from relatives working in nearby towns or coastal diamond mines. The high rate of unemployment also means that the people must rely heavily on the local natural resources for getting fuelwood and grazing for their livestock. Methods used for data collection and analysis The assessment of households' and communities' collective capacities and abilities to create and follow rules was done with semi-structured interviews with community members and committee members in over 20 villages of the Namaqualand and some of the Karas region in Namibia. This work has its focus on the linkage between community-level data of 4 villages in Namaqualand, with an additional household survey undertaken with 151 households in the same villages from August to November 2004 1. This survey was part of a larger research done also in an adjacent Namibian region. The questionnaire is based upon former studies of the world bank (Narayan & Woolcock 2000) (Narayan & Cassidy 2001) but adapted on local realities. After the pretest, the first household survey took place in the village of Soebatsfontein with all available respondents and extended to other villages, to get a broader insight in social relations for the whole Namaqualand. If available, the respondents were the head of the household, chosen randomly according to a spatial criteria. The characteristics of households participating in voluntary collective activities and incentive based collective activities are examined with logistical regression analyses of different social capital indicators. Similar test were done on those households who participated less in committees than 3 years ago. For that purpose an confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis for the complete household survey including Namibia was done in order to separate the different dimensions of social capital. As the data was mainly collected using simple and understandable questions with dichotomous response categories, the data is at a nominal or ordinal scale and had to be reduced to factors by using CATPCA (Categorical Principal Components Analysis) or HOMALS (Homogeneity Analysis by Means of Alternating Least Squares) in SPSS 11.0. The results are presented below in table 1. Co-operative and Individualistic Strategies There are interesting differences in the characteristics of those people taking part in unpaid collective work and those that get their efforts rewarded. Voluntary collective action is dominated by people participating at meetings, having trust in their community members, reciprocal norms and a readiness to act for the conservation of the environment - all attributes said to foster cooperative behavior. Contrarily, not the norms or attitudes but the personal characteristics are determining the participation in incentive based collective action 2. Their dominant characteristics 1 Questionnaires can be obtained from the author on request. 2 Additionally, t-tests indicate, that they have significantly lower community norms of trust or reciprocity and significantly higher trust in village committees and political parties. People participating in incentive-based collective
could be paraphrased as relatively poorer individuals with a stronger outside orientation and low willingness to engage for the community. Is this only a coincidence, and if not, what does it imply? Does it simply imply, that people with co-operative strategies do not want money for their effort, or does it rather indicate towards a development that has taken place a long time ago and describes a behavioral pattern rooted in collective activities? Dependent Variable Adjusted R 2 Significant Predictors Voluntary Collective Action 0,607 Participation index Trust in new institutions (NGO, Researcher) Environmental Conation Reciprocity & Sociability Incentive based Collective Action 0,546 Not permanent working No Farm Income No willingness to pay for community Trust in external institutions Environment is not community problem Less participation in committees 0,319 High income Less trust in local institutions Table 1 Regression Results, Namaqualand Distributional conflicts and their motivational origins The assumption, that the people engaging in voluntary collective action are also trying to get a foot into a project with monetary incentives does not sound too strange in an environment with up to 80% unemployment. According to the respective characteristics one could argue, that the cooperative villagers have been crowded out by more individualistic villagers. The monetary incentives offered from committees favor egoistic behavior as within group selection process. People obtaining incentive based collective actions understand the nature and the weaknesses of the institutions in place better. Friendships and political parties have become the dominant mechanism to get a job, not civic responsibility or family ties. This is in line with the finding, that household leaders taking less part in committees are richer people with strong family ties. Intrinsic motivated actions, like collective actions, are based on a feeling of responsibility for a mission. Distributional conflicts around money from donor agencies, the limitation of stocking rates by the municipality, the introduction of the private 'economic units' in 1984 and apartheid in general might have reduced the self determination of individuals making inner community solidarity less important and focusing on individualism. As the motivation to engage in committees becomes only extrinsic, even more with the expectation of payments or rewards, it is the rational strategy for individuals to try to obtain jobs for friends or embezzle money from these committees on the costs of the others. action answered more often, that they were less willing to participate in projects offering benefits for the whole community if they would not benefit directly from their activity. Similarly, a short socio-psychological experiment adapted from (Ernst, Franz, & Kneser 1996), aiming to identify social preferences showed, that people in incentive based collective action were significantly stronger oriented towards their own profits than towards the communities profit.
The transmission of successful strategies to other groups The theory as outlined above, should imply on community-level, that villages with high unemployment will have a stronger reliance on occasional jobs, forming more village committees and therefore having more distributional conflicts, less intrinsic motivation which leads to less general cognitive social capital and vice versa (see table 2 in appendix). Making use of Uphoff's (2000) concept of 'structural' and 'cognitive' social capital 3 and an emphasis on the fact, that moral-based institutions can erode faster and more easily than they form, it is concluded, that the mere existence of many committees (high structural social capital) directs towards a general deterioration of norms of trust, reciprocity and solidarity (low cognitive social capital), extremely important for the collective management of resources and the infrastructure on the commonage. Unemployment, poverty and resource dependency correlate with high structural social capital as a relative large amount of villagers relies on occasional work exemplified in the case of Tweerivier and Spoegrivier. To get a chance of a job or some influence, people form groups or organize voluntary collective actions. Simultaneously, Tweerivier and Spoegrivier have very low rankings of cognitive social capital, indicating, that the negative experiences people make, while interacting in interdependent dilemma situations manifests itself in decreasing mutual trust, beliefs or norms, summarized as cognitive social capital. This might indicate, that cognitive social capital is crucial for the effectiveness of structural social capital, like conservation committees, and that a high number of organizations is more likely to produce the low levels of trust and reciprocity. Participation in institutions usually accounts for institutional change. If a shift occurs towards incentive-based collective action, this reflects a change in societies power structure according to the main hypothesis of the distributional theory of institutional change (Ngaido & Kirk 2000:167). The power structure in the 'new' South Africa has been changed especially favoring the former voiceless "poorest of the poor". This implies, that the priorities on the political agenda has been changed too, as have the methods to provide this help. Aid is based on short-term, individual monetary incentives. Due to the embeddedness, people cannot clearly differentiate between behavior needed for a moral-based long term community conservation activity and one that is aimed at providing short-term benefits. To maximize the likelihood of obtaining jobs or the possibility of delegating them, it becomes a successful strategy to 'free-ride' and to find position in as many committees as possible without doing voluntary work. The provided incentives combined with the enormous unemployment leads to the deterioration of norms for co-operative behavior. It may though not surprise, that Frey & Jegen (2001:204) conclude their survey, "... that an external intervention in common-pool resource dilemmas may fail as it absolves people from moral obligations in general" and that "disturbing the moral of a social group managing natural resources can have disastrous consequences for biodiversity" (O'Riordan & Stoll-Kleemann 2002:15). Concluding remarks Studies aiming at the quantification of social capital should take its various forms into account, as they offer interesting insights. Insights from this study are that every committee in a community is moral based due to its embeddedness and that collective actions used for reducing poverty and providing short-term benefits for individuals are in conflict with collective action for resource conservation including the whole community and generating long-term benefiting. The latter is contingent to well known institutional settings (Agrawal 1999). It should be emphasized, that only a reasonable amount of committees is likely to guarantee intact norms of trust and reciprocity and that new tasks should be delegated to already existent and accepted committees instead of creating new ones. 3 The local institutions and networks created by the government or emerged out of an own initiative are 'structural'; and the trust, norms and values inherent in the culture are defined as 'cognitive' social capital.
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Appendix Figure 1 Namaqualand and 'certain rural areas' source: Timm Hoffman, Cape Town; in: (Wisborg & Rohde 2004) Poverty & Conservation Structural Social Capital Total amount of groups d Cognitive Social Capital Size of the village a Unemployment rate (%) a Stock owners (%) b Lowest income class (%) c Mean index of reciprocity c (from 0 to 1)) Mean general trust (0 to 2) c Tweerivier 207 79,37 14 50 18 0,83 1,00 1,20 Spoegrivier 460 70,54 15 38,5 21 0,85 1,10 1,82 Soebatsfontein 246 48,9 7 14,3 11 0,94 1,44 2,50 Paulshoek 497 65,63 7 21,1 11 1,00 1,36 2,21 Table 2: Poverty Conservation and Dimensions of Social Capital. (Positive values are tagged blue and negative red to highlight the effects for the reader) a Data calculated from South African Census 2001; b Data calculated from SPP 1996; c Data taken from author's household survey 2004; d Data taken from author's community survey 2004 Norm for monetary contribution c (0 to 3)