Participatory vision-building for collective action in natural resource management

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Stefanie Engel
• Subject Area: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 497433404

Unsustainable outcomes of agricultural and natural resource management (NRM) can often be depicted as social dilemma situations, i.e. individually rational behaviour leads to socially undesirable outcomes. Examples include the overexploitation of groundwater basins and irrigation systems, water pollution and excessive land conversion through agricultural production, as well as deforestation and unsustainable management of common forests. Transition towards socially desirable states in such situations requires collective action among heterogeneous actors. In light of behavioral economic insights on human behavior, a broad literature suggests that participatory approaches have the potential to effectively foster collective action in these situations, and such approaches are increasingly applied in practice. Therefore, evidence is needed on how participatory approaches for agricultural and NRM should best be designed and which specific methods are most effective. Recent experimental research suggests that increasing participation has indeed the potential to promote pro-environmental behavior. However, participatory interventions and their outcomes vary substantially in practice, focussing, for example, on problem awareness, perspective-taking, goal setting, vision-building, social learning and agreement-building on joint strategies. There has thus been a call for a more nuanced understanding of the methods, features and contextual conditions that make participatory interventions successful or ineffective at realizing socially desirable outcomes. A potentially promising method is participatory vision-building (PVB), which aims at crafting shared visions about desirable futures. An important feature of visions is that they go beyond mere goal statements to explicitly invite visualizing what it feels like to have achieved the desired future state, likely activating positive emotions and making the stated goals experiential, inspirational and meaningful. Although the potential of PVB has been emphasized in the literature, the causal link between PVB and collective action in social dilemma situations has not been tested, nor have the underlying mechanisms of how PVB impacts collective action been disentangled. Existing literature has provided rich case studies, which, however, cannot disentangle the impacts of vision-building from those of other core elements of participatory processes. To address these gaps, this project pursues two objectives: (i) analyze the causal effects of PVB on collective action in social dilemma situations, and assess (ii) the possible mechanisms underlying these effects. Its innovation lies in developing and implementing an experimental approach in form of a framed lab-in-the-field experiment with farmers that allows to assess causality and distinguish PVB impacts from other elements of participation. The experiment is planned to be implemented in the context of an agriculturally-used water system in the Colombian Andes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants