Incentives to Cooperate and Fairness Norms in the Provision of Water – Cases of Namibian Land Reform Projects
Abstract: Achieving cooperation in natural resource management is always a challenge when incentives exist for an individual to maximise her short term benefits at the cost of a group. We assess the situation of a social dilemma in water supply cooperation within land reform projects in Namibia. In the context of the Namibian land reform, beneficiaries share the operation and maintenance of water infrastructure in order to gain economies of scale. Our paper assesses how alternative fairness norms affect the probability of cooperation. In the first step of our research we conducted an exploratory overview of the social-ecological system of central Namibian land reform projects. The SES-framework of Ostrom (2009) served as a guideline for this assessment. Taking into account the complexity of the cooperation situation we designed a role-play which is based on a social-ecological simulation model. The experiment simulates the real life decision situation of land reform beneficiaries where equilibriums are permanently changing. This approach helped us not only to better understand the cooperation challenges of Namibian land reform beneficiaries but provided support to stakeholders in their decision making and institution building. Our study provides evidence that different fairness norms overlap. Land reform beneficiaries increase their contributions as the other group members increase their payments (conditional cooperation), as they are more productive (inequality aversion) and own more livestock (congruence of appropriation and provision & inequality aversion). Decisions are made considering the overall context.
