Research in Uganda

I am currently in Kampala, Uganda, for about a two month stint which will include some fieldwork, some office time, and some coursework.  I am primarily here as part of a research project I'm working on with my dissertation advisor back at CU as well as an ever-increasing number of scholars from an ever-increasing number of institutions.  These, at present, include UAS, CU, UCONN, U. Michigan, Indiana U., IIASA in Austria, and research institutes in Poland, Bolivia, and Uganda.  Here, in Kampala, I'm working with a group of foresters, environmental scientists, and geographers at Makarere University.

The research project itself is an investigation of (among other things) the conditions under which institutions (that is, for you non-Ostromites, rules, norms, and patterns of behavior) emerge that can permit effective resource management.  Of course, the resource we're focusing on is forests, but we hope our findings will be applicable to a range of other types of resources.  In particular, we're interested to see if (a) communities with greater diversity have a harder time managing resources, (b) if communities with greater inequality have a harder time managing resources, and (c) if communities with greater familiarity with forests will have an easier time managing resources.

There is also another major component of the project, which is (d) if payments for ecosystem services will tend to promote forest conservation, or if they won't make any difference.  This last one deserves a little bit of explanation:

Basically, the UN and other international organizations, as well as some governments (Costa Rica comes to mind) have taken up this idea that if people who own or control forests are paid for the benefits that those forests provide (by doing things like cleaning water and taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere), there will be more of an incentive for people to conserve forests. Sounds like a simple idea that is likely to work, but the devil is in the details.  One argument is that unless payments are very large, they are unlikely to motivate people to conserve for economic reasons alone, and there's a concern that when you start to pay people, other motivations (like love of the outdoors and altruism) might get pushed into the background.  So if payments aren't big enough, or if they start big and then go away, and if they encourage people to stop thinking about how much they love nature, then plans like this could really hurt over the long run.

Our research plan has a number of components, but we basically have two big things that we're doing.  The first is that we're using behavioral experiments to test peoples' behavior in a hypothetical environment in which they receive payments for conserving forests.

We're also using survey data to try to link these abstract experiments--basically games rural Ugandans and Bolivians will play--to reality on the ground, although there are some things that we can only do in the experiments, or (conversely) we can only do with survey data.