A major problem worldwide is the potential loss of fisheries, forests, and water resources Understanding of the processes that lead to improvements in or deterioration of natural resources is limited, because scientific disciplines use different concepts and languages to describe and explain complex social-ecological systems (SESs) Without a common framework to organize findings, isolated knowledge does not cumulate Until recently, accepted theory has assumed that resource users will never self-organize to maintain their resources and that governments must impose solutions Research in multiple disciplines, however, has found that some government policies accelerate resource destruction, whereas some resource users have invested their time and energy to achieve sustainability A general framework is used to identify 10 subsystem variables that affect the likelihood of self-organization in efforts to achieve a sustainable SES

A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

▪ Abstract We explore the social dimension that enables adaptive ecosystem-based management. The review concentrates on experiences of adaptive governance of social-ecological systems during periods of abrupt change (crisis) and investigates social sources of renewal and reorganization. Such governance connects individuals, organizations, agencies, and institutions at multiple organizational levels. Key persons provide leadership, trust, vision, meaning, and they help transform management organizations toward a learning environment. Adaptive governance systems often self-organize as social networks with teams and actor groups that draw on various knowledge systems and experiences for the development of a common understanding and policies. The emergence of “bridging organizations” seem to lower the costs of collaboration and conflict resolution, and enabling legislation and governmental policies can support self-organization while framing creativity for adaptive comanagement efforts. A resilient social-eco...

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Adaptive governance of social-ecological systems

Human institutions—ways of organizing activities—affect the resilience of the environment. Locally evolved institutional arrangements governed by stable communities and buffered from outside forces have sustained resources successfully for centuries, although they often fail when rapid change occurs. Ideal conditions for governance are increasingly rare. Critical problems, such as transboundary pollution, tropical deforestation, and climate change, are at larger scales and involve nonlocal influences. Promising strategies for addressing these problems include dialogue among interested parties, officials, and scientists; complex, redundant, and layered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.

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The Struggle to Govern the Commons

With the publication of The Logic of Collective Action in 1965, Mancur Olson challenged a cherished foundation of modern democratic thought that groups would tend to form and take collective action...

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Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms

This wide-ranging book, based on a report to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, bridges the gap between the enormous amount of empirical literature documenting efforts at managing local-level resources and the quickly growing body of theoretical knowledge dealing with natural resource management By building a unifying framework, the authors aim to better define the conditions of success or failure of various forms of resource management at the village level Contrary to a common view according to which mismanagement of such resources is to be ascribed to direct users falling prey to the Tragedy of the Commons', they convincingly argue that there are other important potential explanations, such as lack of awareness about ecological effects of human activities, poverty and heavy discounting of future income streams, uncertainty over future property rights and prices of natural products, and availability of more attractive income opportunities Moreover, even when mismanagement practices obviously result from strategic interactions among users, many anthropological writings have pointed at crucial aspects that are bypassed by the characterization in terms of the classical Prisoner's Dilemma Among these aspects, problems of leadership, co-ordination, and heterogeneity are given special emphasis in this book The theoretical analysis specifies the various economic conditions (such as the extent of resource scarcity and market penetration, the size of user communities, and the nature of different parties' interests in the resource) and social considerations (such as the state of interpersonal communication, the frequency of interactions, the type of leadership, and the extent of mutual trust) under which these problems can possibly be overcome by local user groups Stress is then laid on the global context within which user groups operate, including the nature and the forms of state intervention and the effects of increasing market integration To date, this context has generally been uncongenial to community-based resource management; therefore, the authors recommend that, whenever a co-management approach is feasible, the concrete institutional form adopted is tailored to the specific features of local cultures

Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There a Role for Rural Communities?

We build a model of child labor and study its implications for welfare. We assume that there is a trade‐off between child labor and the accumulation of human capital. Even if parents are altruistic and child labor is socially inefficient, it may arise in equilibrium because parents fail to fully internalize its negative effects. This occurs when bequests are zero or when capital markets are imperfect. We also study the effects of a simple ban on child labor and derive conditions under which it may be Pareto improving in general equilibrium. We show that the implications of child labor for fertility are ambiguous.

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Is Child Labor Inefficient

In this chapter, we discuss whether or not “governance” is an important source of variation in development experiences We draw four main conclusions First, governance is best thought of a subset of “institutions” and as such emphasis on governance is consistent with much recent academic work Nevertheless, governance is a quite vague rubric which is difficult to unbundle Second, the governance of a society is the outcome of a political process and as such is closely related to the literature on the political economy of development Third, improving governance necessitates understanding the nature of the entire political equilibrium Finally, an important research frontier is understanding the forces that create or impeded endogenous changes in governance

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Governance and Development

The Ambiguous Impact of Inequality on Local Resource Management

This paper investigates individual motives to participate in rotating savings and credit associations (roscas).Detailed evidence from roscas in a Kenyan slum (Nairobi) suggests that most roscas are predominantly composed of women, particularly those living in a couple and earning an independent income. To explain this phenomenon, we propose an argument based on conflictual interactions within the household.Participation in a rosca is a strategy a wife employs to protect her savings against claims by her husband for immediate consumption.The empirical implications of the model are then tested using the data collected in Kenya.

Jean-Marie Baland

Papers

Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is There a Role for Rural Communities?

Is Child Labor Inefficient

Governance and Development

The Ambiguous Impact of Inequality on Local Resource Management

The Economics of Roscas and Intra-Household Resource Allocation