Sustaining local commons in the face of uncertain ecological thresholds: Evidence from a framed field experiment with Colombian small-scale fishers

Caroline Schill and Juan Carlos Rocha

Ecological Economics, 2023, vol. 207, issue C

Abstract: Due to climate change abrupt and persistent changes in ecosystems, impacting millions of livelihoods, are likely but hard to predict. How people respond to such uncertain ‘regime shifts’ is poorly understood. Here, we assess the potential for local collective action to avert uncertain, yet catastrophic, regime shifts using behavioural economic experiments with 256 small-scale fishers from the Colombian Caribbean coast. With a framed, dynamic common-pool resource game, we tested the effect of different degrees of uncertainty (risk, ambiguity, certainty) about the existence of climate-induced thresholds on group exploitation patterns. Results from four different communities show that groups uncertain about thresholds are likely to sustain higher stock levels, thus potentially averting regime shifts. We also find that threshold uncertainty does not influence exploitation beyond thresholds. However, catch inequalities in the game, and community-level factors influence such exploitation, and appear to limit or even eliminate treatment effects; highlighting the significant influence of context on behaviour. Contrasting previous evidence, our results suggest to focus less on determining precise threshold likelihoods, but rather on identifying and communicating what ecosystem variables might have thresholds, and their potential consequences. Hence, we provide a more hopeful outlook given the irreducible uncertainties in relation to global environmental change.

Keywords: Threshold uncertainty; Ambiguity; Common-pool resource; Communication; Climate change; Ecosystem regime shift; Behavioural experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922003561
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:207:y:2023:i:c:s0921800922003561

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107695

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().