Self-Governance and Punishment: An Experimental Study among Namibian Forest Users

Björn Vollan, Michael Pröpper, Andreas Landmann and Loukas Balafoutas

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2019, vol. 67, issue 4, 935 - 967

Abstract: We use a framed field experiment to assess resource harvesting behavior and its interaction with prosocial and antisocial punishment in the Kavango woodland savannah of Namibia. We implement two treatments, one with external, centralized punishment and one with internal, decentralized punishment. Our findings suggest that institution type matters, as internal punishment is a more effective regime to discipline high harvesters compared with external punishment. We find that antisocial punishment (i.e., the sanctioning of people who cooperate by free riders) happens frequently, partly as revenge and especially in ethnically heterogeneous groups, but ultimately does not prevent cooperative self-governance.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/700098 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/700098 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/700098

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().