Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
be labour costs of constructing irrigation infrastructure, fencing around
the pastures and maintenance costs like i re prevention measures in com-
munity forestry and cleaning of canals in community-managed irrigation
systems. Furthermore, start-up costs also involve organizational ef ort
to collectively mobilize community members towards collective action.
Bardhan and Dayton-Johnson (2000) considered that benei ts from local-
level collective action are a non-convex function of the ef ort provided
to produce those benei ts if there is a threshold level of aggregate ef ort
that must be supplied before any benei ts are realized. As ef ort increases
beyond the threshold, however, benei ts to the group begin to increase. It
is impossible for poorer members to contribute and bear a signii cant part
of these start-up costs in order to initiate community-based resource man-
agement. In this respect, wealthier and better-endowed users may be able
to mobilize the capital necessary to support and materialize the collective
action. Baland and Platteau (1997) also coni rm the theoretical possibility
of this Olson ef ect in the presence of non-convexities.
Theoretical literature on heterogeneity is also supplemented by empiri-
cal studies undertaken in dif erent parts of the world, especially in
developing countries. Drawing upon recent theoretical advances in the
analysis of cooperation, Molinas (1998) undertook an econometric analy-
sis of the determinants of successful collective action based on a survey
of 104 peasant cooperative institutions in Paraguay. This study shows
that controlling as much as possible for the specii c characteristics of the
community and peasant committee, the relationship between community
inequality and cooperative performance is an inverted U. It was evident
that community members with bigger land holdings are expected to
benei t proportionally more from the committee's activities than members
with smaller holdings. Since the provision of community infrastructure
will increase the average price of land in the community, users who own
more land naturally benei t more. In addition, the benei ts accruing from
joint commercialization of the outputs and collective buying of inputs are
proportional to the scale of production, which in turn depends upon the
size of the land holding. The study concludes that local-level cooperation
is not monotonically related to either the degree of inequality of endow-
ments within the community or the local intervention; rather, it is of an
inverted U-shape form. Dayton-Johnson (2000) develops a simple model
of individual households' incentives to provide collective maintenance
ef ort in a communally owned irrigation system in Mexico. He found that
economic inequality and social heterogeneity are consistently and sig-
nii cantly associated with lower levels of infrastructure maintenance and
reduce the performance of collective action, while inequality in landhold-
ings has a negative, though complicated, ef ect on maintenance. Similar to
