Conference Agenda

We study the non-cooperative harvesting of a stochastic, mobile renewable natural resource where resource harvesters are risk-averse. We develop a stochastic bioeconomic model to analyze how strategic behavior may change under risk aversion. Contrary to previous literature assuming risk-neutral harvesters, we find that the harvester benefiting from dispersal may harvest more aggressively due to a `smoothing effect'. We apply our model to the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna fishery and find that risk aversion may mask efficiency losses associated with resource mobility. Our research highlights the significance of understanding the interplay between risk aversion and spatial dynamics in renewable resource management, demonstrating that interacting ecological and social factors can significantly alter the incentives for resource users.

Arid and semi-arid regions around the world are inhabited by pastoralists who depend on livestock rearing for their subsistence. Exogenous shocks like droughts can cause regime shifts that threaten both ecological stability and economic livelihoods. We incorporate pastoralist economic incentives and preferences into an existing dynamic eco-hydrological grazing model exhibiting bi-stability by coupling off-take decisions to a weighted utility function, describing value generated by animal sales, ongoing benefits like milk and herd size for status and insurance for future setbacks. We find that higher prices, or equivalently, better market access for pastoralists, increases the system's resilience to irreversible shocks if pastoralists maximize their utility. On the other hand, we find that higher prices do promote management strategies with less resilience to shocks that are reversible. This means that while damage to the ecosystem can be restored, economic livelihoods will come under stress doing so, because herd size and/or off-take levels have to be reduced during this process. In addition to these findings, we present a mapping of the trade-off between utility and resilience by plotting the efficient combinations on Pareto frontiers. Higher prices steepen these frontiers, making resilience increasingly costly in terms of forgone utility. However, different abiotic conditions such as rainfall and soil type also affect these frontiers, which allows us to identify under which conditions it is attractive to trade in utility for resilience. This paper adds both to the literature about resilience in social-ecological systems in general and resilient management of rangelands prone to irreversible collapse specifically.

We report results from laboratory experiments examining common pool resource (CPR) management when group members could be excluded and excluded individuals could continue to extract from the resource through poaching. Endogenous exclusion created CPR “insiders” and excluded “outsiders,” introducing a boundary problem in which exclusion from the group does not automatically prevent access to the resource. We studied four treatments that varied whether insiders could expel group members, whether excluded individuals could poach from the resource, and whether poaching was deterred through enforcement. When exclusion was possible and poaching was prevented, insiders targeted less cooperative members for expulsion, total withdrawals fell, and insider earnings increased. Without enforcement, exclusion reduced insider withdrawals relative to the Baseline, but increased outsider extraction largely offset these reductions, so exclusion primarily reallocated extraction rather than substantially reducing total extraction. Introducing enforcement against poaching significantly reduced outsider extraction and partially restored the benefits of exclusion for insiders. The results show that ostracism can be an effective governance mechanism only when boundaries around the resource are enforced.

We examine how political reservation affects environmental disaster relief. Using restricted-access data on human–wildlife conflict in the Himalayas, we find tribal communities face more conflict yet receive less compensation. Our model predicts minority leaders favor coethnics, reducing discrimination. Exploiting quasi-random variation from India’s reservation system, we show compensation per attack is higher and rises faster with tribal population share in tribal-led villages. This ethnic favoritism occurs because tribal claimants negotiate more effectively under coethnic leadership. Although overall conflict is lower under tribal leaders, welfare analysis shows tribal communities secure greater overall compensation, as representation helps navigate corruption and promotes fairness.