Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
stage for a co-management approach when monitoring and enforcement
and conl ict resolution become more important. This is because the costs
of monitoring and enforcement are likely to be lower as resource users
are more likely to comply with community-devised rules and regulations
as opposed to regulation imposed by a centralized government authority.
Since monitoring costs are the major transaction costs, and monitoring is
undertaken by the community, there is an opportunity for these costs to
decline over time as community acceptance of the rules and regulations for
managing the common property increases with a greater moral obligation
to obey those rules and regulations (Kuperan et al., 1998), that is, the costs
are internalized. They further argue that monitoring activities emerge as
the activity accounts for more than 50 per cent of the total costs of all the
activities involved in co-management. It takes up the bulk of the time as it
is a continuous day-to-day activity and it is a crucial activity for the main-
tenance of institutions (Kuperan et al., 1998).
The impact of group heterogeneity
I now turn to a slightly dif erent issue, heterogeneity, which has direct
policy implications for the emergence of local management institutions.
One of the issues related to successful collective action is the contested
role of group heterogeneity, which is assumed to have something to do
with the way institutions evolve. Particularly important among these
issues is the question of socioeconomic, ethnic and political heterogeneity
and their ef ect on local-level collective action and resource management
(Keohane and Ostrom, 1995; Baland and Platteau, 1996, 1998; Schlager
and Blomquist, 1998; Uphof , 1998; Bardhan and Dayton-Johnson, 2000;
Velded, 2000; Varughese and Ostrom, 2001). The assumption is that
socioeconomic dif erentiation and group heterogeneity make cooperative
arrangements more dii cult. On the one hand, there is widespread reali-
zation that productivity-enhancing CPR governance is dii cult when
appropriators are heterogeneous in regard to their socioeconomic endow-
ments. A large and inl uential component of the literature claims that
heterogeneity inhibits innovation of local management institutions since it
creates distrust and suppresses the level of mutual understanding among
community members. In such communities, the process of crafting rules
and regulations with respect to how a resource should be managed can
involve high levels of local dispute. Some economic and social science
literature emphasizes that homogeneity or heterogeneity among agents in
any society rel ects the levels of trust, which inl uences the emergence of
local management institutions through its impact on costs of transactions
(Zak and Knack, 2001). Some other scholars, on the other hand, posit
that heterogeneity is not necessarily bad for collective action. Baland and
