probably the last time. This has been a really enjoyable stay, and
productive (I think), although some of statistically significant
findings that came out of ideas gathered here are really sensitive to
model specification, and other ideas I can't test. Still, I have high
hopes for these ideas about jurisdictional optimality and social bonds
and collective action problems.
Although I really get a kick out of conducting these interviews and
being able to talk to the locals, the best part of this segment has been
the fantastic set of Estadounidenses that I've bumped into here--the
three local Peace Corps volunteers (without whom, this segment of my
trip wouldn't have been nearly as successful), and the folks from
Louisville down here putting in water purification systems (without whom
I wouldn't have eaten nearly as well--though I would have eaten several
more combination hamburger/fried chicken sandwiches).
Basically, my story about Uspantán is this:
First, this is a geographically huge municipality--they tell me that it
takes about ten hours to travel from end to end, which seems about
right, based on my limited experience. In a jurisdiction of this size,
even a municipality, the statistics we use to measure local outcomes
mask a tremendous amount of variation that I wish I could get my hands
around. Statistics at the village level, in a place like this, would be
fantastic.
Even so, I've found out one thing:
The thing I've found out--Uspantán isn't the low outlier that it first
seemed to be. Upon some observation, I suspected that some of the
numbers in our survey were inaccurate, so I went in to talk to the
treasurer, and after three attempts, finally caught up with him. I
double-checked some of the strange values in our dataset (municipal
employees and percent of the local budget in forestry) and found that
the old values were too low. I entered the new values and re-plotted
the regressions, and although Uspantán still sits a little below the
regression line in most of the models I've been using, it's a lot closer
than it was before. This means that Krister's institutional approach
explains Uspantán better than it seemed at first.
And I've come up with some good ideas which I might be able to test:
1. Social bonds severed by the civil war may help communities surmount
collective action problems to manage forests in a more sustainable way,
and to avoid tragedy-of-the-commons situations.
2. Too-large jurisdictional boundaries can also create a
tragecy-of-the-commons, where municipalities face pressures from
individuals who favor too-restrictive and unrestrictive forestry policy,
and where individuals feel compelled to harvest trees to quickly, lest
their neighbors do it for them. Smaller jurisdictional sizes with de
facto powers of enforcement solve this problem, by creating clear
community "property rights" which encourage sustainable practices (since
the community can ensure that the trees won't be cut down by others,
they have more reasons to harvest them gradually, in a sustainable way)
3. Social bonds also seem to matter in helping communities avoid
internal tragedies-of-the-commons.
4. And although the part of me that's been socialized as a rational
choicer wants to pooh-pooh this, constructivist-like ideas about people
developing an environmental consciousness have come up again and again
interviews, and seem to be supported by the statistical significance of
variables that measure education in several models. I just wish I had a
more convincing way to get at this, and to avoid the reverse-causality
associated with these kinds of models (of course people who have, for
example, an economic interest in sustainable forestry will be keen to
talk about conservation and their development of an environmental
consciousness).
No comments:
Post a Comment