Adoption of community monitoring improves common pool resource management across contexts

SECTOR

Maternal Health

PROJECT TYPE

Field and Lab Experiments

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Altruism | Perspective | Monitoring

Location

Global South

OVERVIEW

Community monitoring can improve the management of Common Pool Resources (CPRs) in different contexts. CPR management institutions vary across sites, and the success of these institutions relies on solving information problems. Information helps users understand the benefits and costs of resource extraction and enables managers to target enforcement efforts.

The introduction of community monitoring aims to provide new information about the status and use of CPRs, and the results show that monitoring reduced resource use and degradation across sites.

THEMATIC AREAS

We have identified three mechanisms for how monitoring addresses information problems:

Improved enforcement efficiency of existing rules.
Increased demand for enforcement.
Facilitated creation of new rules.

These mechanisms are only as effective as the relationships between the community, monitors, and management authorities allow. Monitoring has led to greater scrutiny of resource management authorities and increased citizen awareness of the resource’s condition. Community monitoring has proved to be an effective policy tool for reducing resource use or degradation in diverse contexts.