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Social capital dynamics and collective action: the role of subjective satisfaction in a common pool resource experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2015

Leonardo Becchetti ,
Stefano Castriota  and
Pierluigi Conzo
Leonardo Becchetti
Affiliation:
Università di Roma Tor Vergata, Facoltà di Economia, Dipartimento di Economia e Istituzioni, Via Columbia 2, 00133 Roma, Italy. Tel. +39-06-72595706. Fax +39-06-2020500. E-mail: [email protected]
Stefano Castriota
Affiliation:
University of Bolzano, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
Pierluigi Conzo
Affiliation:
University of Turin & CSEF, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In low-income countries, grassroots collective action for the management of a common environmental resource is a well-known substitute for government provision of public goods. In our research we test experimentally what its effect is on social capital. To this purpose we structure a ‘sandwich’ experiment in which participants play a common pool resource game (CPRG) between two trust games in a Nairobi slum where social capital is scarce but informal rules regulating the commons are abundant. Our findings show that the change in trustworthiness between the two trust game rounds generated by the CPRG experience is crucially affected by the subjective satisfaction about the CPRG, rather than by standard objective measures related to CPRG players' behaviour. These results highlight that subjective satisfaction in a collective action has relevant predictive power on social capital creation, providing information which can be crucial to designing successful self-organized environmental resource regimes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , August 2016 , pp. 512 - 531
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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