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Drivers of compliance monitoring in forest commons

Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages 450–456 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Lasting community-based governance of common-pool resources depends on communities self-organizing to monitor compliance with rules. Monitoring serves an important function in community-based governance by establishing conditions for long-term cooperation, but the factors that foster its provision are poorly understood. We have analysed data from 177 forest user groups to assess the relative importance of 15 potential drivers of compliance monitoring, as well as the direction and form of their relationships. The results suggest that user groups are most likely to successfully self-organize to monitor compliance when rules are designed by local user groups (local rulemaking), and when those user groups are located close to or far from markets for forest products and have a larger number of members. Additionally, local leadership plays an important role in certain contexts, such as groups that are smaller in size and located near markets for forest products.

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Fig. 1: Global distribution of cases.
Fig. 2: Relative influence of variables.
Fig. 3: Partial dependence plots for the three most influential variables.
Fig. 4: Partial dependence plots for leadership interactions.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available as a supplement to this paper and at https://github.com/gbepstein/Compliancemonitoring.

Code availability

The code that supports the findings of this study is available as a supplement to this paper and at https://github.com/gbepstein/Compliancemonitoring.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) through funding received from the National Science Foundation (DBI-1639145).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Graham Epstein & Jacopo Baggio

  2. School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Graham Epstein

  3. ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

    Georgina Gurney, Sivee Chawla & Graeme S. Cumming

  4. School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    John M. Anderies

  5. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    John M. Anderies

  6. Sustainable Coastal Systems Cluster, National Center for Integrated Coastal Research, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Jacopo Baggio

  7. Urban Institute, ICOSS, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Hita Unnikrishnan

  8. School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Hita Unnikrishnan

  9. Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Sergio Villamayor Tomas

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All authors contributed equally to research design and the writing of this manuscript. G.E. performed the analysis.

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Correspondence to Graham Epstein.

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Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Krister Andersson, Ashwini Chhatre and Pushpendra Rana for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–3 and Tables 1–5.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Compliance monitoring data.

Supplementary Data 2

Compliance monitoring code in R.

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Epstein, G., Gurney, G., Chawla, S. et al. Drivers of compliance monitoring in forest commons. Nat Sustain 4, 450–456 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00673-4

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