Can Collective Action Institutions Outperform the State? Evidence from Treatment of Abandoned Mine Drainage

Max Harleman and Jeremy G. Weber

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: A core public administration literature seeks to understand whether decentralized collective action institutions will emerge to provide public goods, such as management of environmental resources. Few studies examine how they perform relative to the state at providing public goods, and they fail to account for the possibility that the state might self-select into providing public goods in the most challenging contexts. If it does, finding that the state performs worse than collective action institutions could reflect its more challenging context rather than differences in knowledge, skill, or motivation. We examine several quantitative measures of performance in remediating polluted water discharges from abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania, a task sometimes done by the state and sometimes by nonprofit watershed associations. We find that the two types of institutions address discharges with generally similar water quality problems and build systems that yield similar initial improvements in water quality. However, watershed association systems better maintain effectiveness at reducing acidity and removing heavy metals over time. The findings suggest a role for sustained public investment in collective action institutions to address complex and enduring environmental problems.

Keywords: collective action; abandoned mines; water quality; decentralization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-12-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/121315/9/MPRA_paper_121315.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/121315/1/PublicPrivate_MPRA.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:121315

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().