Predictors of Successful Between-Community Cooperation in Effective Resource Management

Resource management and conservation initiatives often require that communities work together to manage or conserve forests, grasslands, watersheds, and fisheries. While development partners emphasize scaling up the initiatives that work to new locations, we still understand little about when and why communities do or do not work together to manage or conserve, impeding successful scaling up and potentially leading to an inefficient use of donor dollars.

This project, conducted in collaboration with a coastal community network that is funded by US Forest Service, unifies research from across academia and the development world to make concrete predictions about when and why communities work together in resource management. It will fund and train a postdoctoral researcher, a graduate student, and nine research team members in scientific research methods.

The project will generate a set of guidelines for how development partners can select pilot sites where between-community cooperation is likely to succeed; with limited hurdles to cooperation, partners can then work out other obstacles to scaling up before expanding their initiatives.

This project investigates whether individuals’ concerns about what happens to neighboring communities, plus their connections with those communities, promotes successful resource management. Until now, ideas about what might promote between-community cooperation have remained largely theoretical and have usually been evaluated in the laboratory. This project involves on-the-ground data collection in 32 communities, where the project team will collect individual-level data about attitudes toward and connections with neighboring communities, as well as other candidate predictors of between-community cooperation, before the rollout of a fisheries management initiative.

The team will then revisit these individuals to measure their participation in between-community cooperation 12 months after initiative rollout. By assessing the relevance of baseline factors to later successful resource management, this project provides a real-world test of theoretical work on when and why between-community cooperation works.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.