Effects of experience with access regimes on stewardship behaviors of small-scale fishers |
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Authors: | María I. Rivera-Hechem Ricardo A. Guzmán Carlos Rodríguez-Sickert Stefan Gelcich |
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Affiliation: | 1. Centro de Investigación en Complejidad Social (CICS), Facultad de Gobierno, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile;2. Instituto Milenio en Socio-ecología Costera, Santiago, Chile |
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Abstract: | Governance regimes that assign exclusive access to support collective action are increasingly promoted to manage common-pool resources under the premise that they foster environmental stewardship. However, experimental evidence linked to existing policies that support this premise is lacking. Overlapping access policies in small-scale fisheries provide a unique opportunity to test the effects of access regimes on users’ stewardship behaviors. We performed a lab-in-the-field experiment to assess how fishers’ previous experience with access regimes relates to compliance and peer enforcement (n = 120). Fishers’ compliance and peer-enforcement decisions were compared in a common-pool-resource game. Treatments differed in framing to represent exclusive access and pseudo-open access regimes, both of which fishers face in real life. To contrast behavior in the game with real-life observations, we compared fishers’ associations that have shown relatively high and low management performance under exclusive access policies. Compliance and peer enforcement were higher under the exclusive access treatment than under the pseudo-open access treatment only for fishers’ associations with high management performance in real life. Behaviors in the game reflected differences between associations in real life. Our results support previous research on ocean governance by experimentally assessing the role of access regimes in determining users’ stewardship and suggest potential mechanisms for stewardship internalization. |
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Keywords: | collective action environmental stewardship external validity lab-in-the-field experiment small-scale fisheries territorial user rights for fisheries acción colectiva derechos de uso territorial para las pesquerías experimento de campo gestión ambiental pesquería a pequeña escala validez externa |
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