Global changes in the natural and social environment put natural resource systems under increasing pressure. This development is particularly acute for communally managed resources such as fisheries. On the one hand, economic incentives encourage overusing ecosystem resources while on the other hand, resource users directly rely on the services provided by the ecosystem. This reliance is particularly significant in the developing world where natural resources are often vital for providing food security, employment possibilities, and a steady flow of income for subsistence level households. The exploitation of common-pool resources can therefore become a livelihood of last resort that buffers income shocks in a growing economy. However, natural resources are often poorly regulated due to weak legal institutions and insufficient enforcement of regulations. Solutions to this social dilemma are desperately sought-after but not obvious.
The NATCOOP project adopts a social-ecological perspective towards the sustainable development of natural resources. By bringing the dynamic two-way relationship between nature and cooperation in renewable resource systems into focus, the project aims to study how nature shapes preferences and incentives of economic agents and how this in turn affects common-pool resource management. In recent advances of the economic literature, the effect of the natural environment on economic agents has been largely overlooked. NATCOOP aims to incorporate the “environment” of an agent into the analysis. Thereby, the project proposes a new perspective on common-pool resource management in order to improve the understanding of the relationship between nature and cooperation. This should facilitate solutions for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to pursue long-term social and economic development.
The NATCOOP team visited fisheries in Tanzania, Chile, and Norway to study these three topics. The fisheries for dagaa and Nile perch at Lake Victoria, the pelagic and benthic fisheries in Chile, and the Norwegian fisheries for cod and herring serve as case studies with differing natural and social environments. Through comparing these frameworks and drawing connections between all three topics, NATCOOP utilized organizational and conceptual synergies as a unified project. In one line, NATCOOP highlights specific mechanisms how the natural environment influences incentives for common-pool resource use that can be used to improve governance.
