Common-Pool Resource Management

Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) initiatives aim to link socioeconomic development with sustainable natural resource use and the conservation of biodiversity of natural resources. CBNRM relies on the concept that rights, responsibilities, and authority for natural resource management decisions should rest with local communities; the decentralization of natural resource management is central to a rights-based sustainable development approach. Despite a global push to decentralize natural resource governance over the past two decades, many initiatives have failed to reach their intended goals. Much research has focused on identifying the kinds of enabling conditions and accompanying institutional arrangements needed to promote collective action (investing) and reduce free riding (exploitation) to bring about more sustainable and equitable management of shared resources. This chapter reviews the theory and conditions thought to aid and allow communities collectively to manage resources more equitably and sustainably. Management of community forests is used to explore current knowledge gaps and what these represent for sustainable development interventions.

The Economics of Public Health in the Presence of Exploitation Strategies

Public health faces novel challenges because of rising bacterial resistance to antibiotics and the possible fatal spread of highly communicable viral infections. Multiple economic agents interact in the use and provision of anti-infective drugs, without accounting for their impact on others, and this gives rise to positive and negative externalities. On the supply side, anti-infective drugs may be linked, depending on the particular epidemiological context. A common example is that of antibiotic treatment effectiveness, which can be lost over time, affecting various antibiotics belonging to the same antibiotic family. This chapter describes how conflicting private objectives among economic agents may lead to exploitation strategies that lower the overall social welfare. Important open research questions are highlighted and possible public policies addressed that could address the problem of antimicrobial resistance.

Does Social Exploitation within Pathogen Populations Pose an Opportunity for Novel Therapeutic Approaches?

Bacterial virulence (damage to host) is often cooperative, with individual cells paying costs to promote collective exploitation. This chapter reviews how cooperative virulence traits offer novel therapeutic avenues involving either the genetic introduction or chemical induction of “cheats” that can socially exploit the cooperative wild-type infection. Issues of efficacy and evolutionary robustness are discussed, and evidence of an evolutionarily robust therapeutic that targets bacterial social behaviors is highlighted.

Exploitative Strategies

This chapter reviews the consequences of exploitative strategies for individual behavior, social structure, and design of institutions. It outlines how natural selection should act to construct behavioral connections that maximize benefits and minimize costs of sociality for individuals. Individuals are predicted to show specific leaving or joining decision rules that will construct groups composed of complementary strategies; alternatively, they should be plastic in response to their social environment, which can lead to conditional strategies and social niche construction. What happens on an individual level impacts, in turn, social structures: individual interactions with specific (known) individuals may result in “groupiness” and reduce uncertainty in interactions. Economic conflict theory provides a framework to predict exploitative behavior between groups. Better understanding of exploitation at these different levels may permit the payoffs of specific interactions to be adjusted, thus reducing the negative impacts on a system.

Challenges for Market and Institutional Design when Countering Exploitation Strategies

Cooperation within larger groups is often endangered by incentives to free ride. One goal of market and institutional design is to create environments in which socially efficient cooperation can be achieved. The main point in this chapter is that only considering first-order incentives to cooperate within a larger group may not be sufficient, as subcoalitions display reciprocal behavior despite the incentives to renege. Three related complications are discussed: (a) exploitative behavior is often coordinated in subgroup coalitions, (b) natural within-group resistance to exploitation already exists, and (c) the actions of group members can often only be imperfectly monitored. Given these realities, implications of current research for applied market and institutional design are outlined.

Introduction

Why do some individuals invest in making a resource available, while others simply wait and exploit the fruits of this effort? Why do some people cooperate in joint production and public goods provision while others free ride and abstain from contributing to aggregate welfare? The phenomenon of exploitation or free riding is studied in many disciplines along separate research traditions. Certainly understanding this phenomenon could be deepened through interdisciplinary exchange. This chapter sets forth the rationale for the joint examination conducted by evolutionary ecologists, economists, anthropologists, and public health scientists. It initiates the collective examination into whether some generality exists across a broad range of species and systems, and posits how new insights might be used to tackle problems related to renewable resource management, public health, and institutional design.

Behavioral Consequence of Exploitation

In behavioral ecology, the behavioral consequences of individuals (exploiters) using the investments of others (investors), rather than investing time or effort in procuring a resource themselves, has been traditionally studied using the producer–scrounger (PS) model—a simple evolutionary game theoretic model in which producers (investors) search for resources while scroungers (exploiters) use the resources found by producers. A key assumption in the PS model is that the producer remains passive toward scroungers. As the presence of scroungers is costly, evidence is reviewed that one major consequence of having exploiters is the adoption by producers of strategies that reduce the benefits of scroungers, giving rise to countermeasures by scroungers. Scroungers also affect population structure by generating consistent differences among individuals and affecting spatial preferences within groups. Reviewing the impact of scrounging on populations should help generate parallels to explore the consequences of exploitative behavior in economics and public health.

Producer–Scrounger Models and Aspects of Natural Resource Use

Humans are using natural resources at unprecedented rates, a situation that could lead to various global catastrophes. To mitigate eventual consequences, the processes involved must be better understood. Resource use frequently involves groups; thus free-riding behavior must be expected. Exploitation of others’ efforts can dramatically alter how resources are utilized. This chapter argues that exploitation of harvesting efforts can be analyzed as a producer–scrounger evolutionary game. The presence of scroungers (exploiters) in a group usually decreases overall use of resources by the group. Factors that increase the proportion of scroungers can further decrease resource use. By contrast, aggression and the compatibility of scrounger and producer strategies elevate resource use. Encouraging scrounging may lower resource use, but this raises a moral dilemma: individual scrounging is bad, reduced resource overuse by the population is good. The consequences of cheating in natural resource management demands attention in future research.

Interventions to Control Damage from Infectious Disease

Human infectious disease results from many factors (e.g., human behavior, disease organisms, institutions) that often interact as opposing agents in accordance to the investor–exploiter dichotomy. Directing interventions to influence these opposing roles may improve human health by differentially influencing the success of exploiters and investors. Alterations made on one level may change outcomes on other levels and affect the impact of disease on states of health. These interactions need to be incorporated into economic models to inform the assessments of interventions to improve health.

Governance of Renewable Resources

Renewable resources have the potential to be used sustainably but typically are not, often due to the existence of exploiters or free riders. This chapter analyzes free-riding behavior using the prisoner’s dilemma-based public goods model and the producer–scrounger model. Overuse of renewable resources is examined under four investor–exploiter scenarios, derived from modifications of the classic producer–scrounger model, and which vary in the degree of excludability of a discovered resource and in the cost of adopting each strategy. Two important factors reduce overuse: when a finder’s advantage can be created for investors, and when the costs of playing exploiter are increased relative to the costs of playing investor. Applying the investor–exploiter model to a fisheries scenario, discussion follows on how interventions designed to reduce overuse may be consistent with the existence of a finder’s advantage. A variety of existing interventions can be seen as increasing the costs of adopting the exploiter strategy.