The importance of cooperation for the sustainability of common resources
06.12.2022
The sustainable use of shared resources – such as groundwater, fisheries or forests – is a major challenge, as it requires its users to cooperate.
While empirical evidence demonstrates that communities can prevent overexploitation (the tragedy of the commons) by developing institutions of self-government that foster collaboration the conditions fostering such cooperation and its long-term benefits have remained overlooked within scientific studies.
The emergence of cooperation from shared goals in the governance of common-pool resources is a paper recently published in Nature Sustainability that demonstrates how cooperation is favoured by those who have access to resource information and whose feedback directly influences decisions made regarding said resources. The international team of the research coordinated by Samir Suweis of the Department of Physics and Astronomy ‘G. Galilei’ of the University of Padova found that when resources run out individuals make adjustments to their needs, but this cooperation only emerges when people are rewarded based on shared goals.
The research, unlike previously published studies, highlights the retroactive effect between decisions (taken by individuals), the trend of available resources, and the link that exists between cooperation and shared objectives.
The authors developed an online game simulation in which users of the same common-pool resource chose individual harvesting rates, which in turn influenced the resource dynamics. Results show that if users share common goals, a high level of self-organized cooperation emerges, leading to long-term resource sustainability.
Outcomes towards cooperation and long-term sustainability are consistent with the results of a theoretical model of resource dynamics and extraction previously developed by the paper’s first author, Chengyi Tu – a professor at Berkeley and Zhejiang Sci-Tech University. That study demonstrated how cooperation was the result of a compromise between the individual and the collective reward. Using optimal control theory, researchers demonstrated that shared goals lead to self-organized collective action that allows for sustainable governance of common resources.
