Participatory vision-building for collective action and sustainable resource management Assessing its potential through an economic experiment

Juan Felipe Ortiz-Riomalo, Stefanie Engel and Ann-Kathrin Koessler

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Sustainable resource management often requires collective action to overcome social dilemmas, which participatory approaches can foster. Participatory vision building (PVB) helps the relevant stakeholders envision, experience and build a shared vision of their desired future. We evaluate its potential through a framed lab-in-the-field experiment. In the experiment, 728 farmers from Lake Tota, Colombia, were asked to choose between two farming practices over several rounds, which impacted their earnings and the shared lake’s water levels. In a PVB treatment condition, participants imagined and discussed their desired future. To assess PVB’s distinctive effect, the control conditions capture the elements that PVB shares with other participatory approaches. In these, participants only discussed their desired outcomes and/or practices, with or without an external vision. We find that individual and group cooperation were relatively higher in PVB but statistically indistinguishable across conditions. On average, cooperation decayed similarly across all conditions. Exploratory analyses suggest significant differences in discussion themes, feelings (of inspiration, frustration, and sadness), and participants’ unilateral prosocial actions, but not in beliefs about others' (expected) cooperation. Although PVB might motivate initial cooperation and even foster unilateral prosocial behaviour, it may fail to prevent frustration and nurture the trust necessary to sustain cooperation.

Keywords: social dilemmas; collective action; natural resource management; participatory processes; participatory governance; visioning; vision-building; participatory vision-building (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D70 D91 Q25 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025, Revised 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-exp
Note: Previous version: 30 July 2024 under the title Envisioning collective action for sustainable resource management: An economic experiment.(https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/300582)
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