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The emergence of cooperation from shared goals in the governance of common-pool resources

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 139–147 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Sustainable use of common-pool resources is a major environmental governance challenge because of possible overexploitation. Communities devise self-governing institutions that avoid overuse and attain long-term benefits of cooperation. It is still unclear, however, what conditions allow cooperation to emerge, leading to greater long-term benefits. Until recently, studies of the sustainable governance of common-pool resources have overlooked feedback between user decisions and resource dynamics and failed to test the ability of shared goals to actually induce cooperation. Here we develop an online game to perform a set of experiments in which users of the same common-pool resource decide on their individual harvesting rates, which in turn are influenced by the resource dynamics. We show that if users share common goals, a high level of self-organized cooperation emerges, leading to long-term resource sustainability. Otherwise, selfish/individualistic behaviours lead to resource depletion. To explain these results, we develop a model of resource-decision dynamics based on optimal control theory and show how it is able to reproduce empirical results. We find that players self-organize and engage in collective action conducive to sustainable governance of common-pool resources by trade-off strategies that balance individual and collective payoff as well as short-term and long-term rewards.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of the Systemic Sustainability Game for the case of 4 players.
Fig. 2: Comparison between stable equilibria of the resource and cooperator fraction in the two game types for the complete network case.
Fig. 3: Behaviour of strategies evolutionary dynamics with fixed resources.
Fig. 4: Comparison of average individual cumulative payoff for both game types with complete network.
Fig. 5: Comparison between experimental results of the Systemic Sustainability Game and its theoretical prediction.

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Data availability

Data for all analyses are available at OSF (https://osf.io/txus6/).

Code availability

Code for all analyses is available at OSF (https://osf.io/txus6/).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Microsoft AI for Earth (C.T.); Experimental Social Science Laboratory at University of California Berkeley (C.T. and P.D.); Natural Science Fund of Zhejiang Province under Grant No. LZ18G010001, LZ22G010001; Science Foundation of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University under Grant No. 18092125-Y, 22092034-Y (C.T.); LINCON INFN grant (S.S.) and BIRD_UNIPD grant (S.S.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China

    Chengyi Tu

  2. Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Chengyi Tu & Paolo D’Odorico

  3. School of Computer Science, University of South China, Hengyang, China

    Zhe Li

  4. School of Software, Yunnan University, Kunming, China

    Zhe Li

  5. Department of Physics and Astronomy “G. Galilei”, INFN, University of Padua, Padova, Italy

    Samir Suweis

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  4. Samir Suweis
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Contributions

C.T. and S.S. conceptualized the project. C.T., Z.L. and S.S. developed the methodology. C.T., P.D. and S.S. conducted the investigations. C.T. and S.S. performed visualization. C.T., P.D. and S.S. acquired funding. P.D. and S.S. administered the project. S.S. supervised the project and wrote the original draft. C.T., P.D. and S.S. wrote, reviewed and edited the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Chengyi Tu or Samir Suweis.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

Nature Sustainability thanks Christiane Runyan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes, Figs. 1–28 and References.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Table 1

All the details of the box-and-whisker charts shown in Fig. 2 and Supplementary Figs. 9–12, including mean, standard deviation, median, minimum, maximum, first quartile and third quartile.

Supplementary Table 2

Detailed description of the statistical tests for Fig. 2.

Supplementary Table 3

Detailed description of the statistical tests for Supplementary Figs. 9–12 by ANOVA.

Supplementary Table 4

Detailed description of the statistical tests for Supplementary Figs. 9–12 by Mann-Whitney test with Bonferroni correction.

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Tu, C., D’Odorico, P., Li, Z. et al. The emergence of cooperation from shared goals in the governance of common-pool resources. Nat Sustain 6, 139–147 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-01008-1

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