Growth and Poverty Mailing List Archive

[Andrew Palfreman <<address removed>>]

Dear all

For many years practioners and stakeholders have reflected on the 
failure of many farmers' and fishermen's cooperatives. Indeed in many 
countries it is difficult to sell the concept of collective action 
because of the historical reputation of failure.

But we know that sometimes collective action does work. I have long felt 
that it is important to bring to bear the economics of collective action 
to explain successes and failures and to offer the tools which might 
predict whether a proposition is going to work or not.

A number of fundamental issues need to be considered. These include the 
characteristics of the production function of the collective good, the 
riskiness of outcome of the collective endeavour, the number of players 
engaged in the game, the rules governing the game and their 
sustainability over time, exclusion mechanisms, the income and wealth of 
the players and the distribution consequences of the game, 
hterogeniety/homgeneity of participants, subjective discount rates, the 
scope for repetition of the activities over time. As sure as night 
follows day it will turn out that some collective actions will work, and 
others can be predicted to fail.

To turn to one specific example, in Bangladesh coastal capture fisheries 
the production function of the collective good might be reduced 
congestion in the fishing zone. The incentive for defection is enormous, 
so success necessarily depends on the engagement of the state in 
sustaining the collective endeavour.

Andrew Palfreman


Dr Andrew Palfreman
118 Marlborough Avenue
Hull
HU5 3JX
UK

44 1482 494943
<address removed>




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