Elsevier

Agricultural Systems

Volume 82, Issue 3, December 2004, Pages 197-214
Agricultural Systems

Methods for studying collective action in rural development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2004.07.006Get rights and content

Abstract

With renewed recognition of the importance of collective action in many aspects of agriculture, natural resource management, and rural development programmes in developing countries, there is a need for research on the factors that affect its emergence, as well as its performance. Yet because of its dynamic nature, collective action is difficult to measure and study. This article discusses ways of conceptualising collective action to provide researchers from various disciplines with a basic framework for understanding and studying collective action. It highlights specific features of collective action that are relevant to identify best practice methodological approaches and research techniques. The main part of the paper then describes how collective action can be operationalised, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of different methods, as well as discussing complementarities among methods. This discussion provides an overview for subsequent studies in this special issue, which present applications of qualitative, quantitative, experimental, and action research methods for studying collective action.

Introduction

Cooperation has always been fundamental for human society, and plays a particularly prominent role in rural development programs. Successes with formal cooperatives in Europe and North America in the early 20th century led to many state-sponsored cooperatives in developing countries, from the 1960s onwards. (For an early and insightful discussion of the roots of the cooperative movement and its application from Germany to the United States, see Tubin, 1912.) But, as Seabright (1997) reminds us, the development paradigms of the 1970s were based on the presumption that communities would fully engage collectively over a large range of activities, with little attention given to what types of activities were best managed at the community level. Dissatisfaction with the performance of many of these programmes led to greater emphasis on either the state or markets to deliver services. However, there were also many instances of state and market failures, particularly in meeting the needs of the poor, while instances of small-scale community collective action – either through indigenous institutions or external programs – provided renewed interest in involving local groups in many spheres of agricultural and rural development. These include watershed management programs, integrated pest management, participatory breeding, extension groups, farmer-managed irrigation systems, and a range of microfinance groups.

The failures of the earlier community-based development programmes and projects rest with the fact that very little attention was given to understanding how collective action arises to deal with different issues, and how it is sustained. Without addressing this critical question, the current policies to devolve natural resources to communities, empower women through self-help groups, or deliver a range of services through community-based organisations also risk failure. But how do we understand where collective action emerges and where it is unlikely to emerge or persist? How do we define and measure the willingness and ability of people to work together? The papers in this special issue address these concerns from a range of perspectives. This paper focuses on collective action for self-governance and management of rural development projects, agricultural practices and natural resource management, which are the topics of the papers in this special issue. Collective action is also very important for many other purposes, ranging from neighbourhood crime watches to political action and social movements. Because of space limits we do not discuss collective action for such other purposes here.

Whereas the last several decades have produced an increasing amount of research on collective action, including that which is directly linked to natural resource management, much has focused on collective action theory, describing the conditions that foster or inhibit effective collective action (e.g., Olson, 1965; Axelrod, 1981; Ostrom, 1990, Ostrom, 1992; Ostrom et al., 1994; Runge, 1992; Sandler, 1992). Empirical studies on collective action are largely comprised of case studies or syntheses across disparate case studies (Uphoff, 1986, Uphoff et al., 1990; Ostrom, 1991; Bromley, 1992; Tang, 1992; Bardhan, 1993; Baland and Platteau, 1996; Agrawal, 2001). Often collective action is not defined in these studies, and when it is, definitions are usually loose and rooted in other concepts that are not clearly defined. The result is that collective action is used to mean many different things, so that its analysis often produces results that do not lend themselves to comparison, hindering researchers’ ability to gain new understanding and advance the frontiers of research on collective action.

Even when researchers are clear about the definitions of collective action and the concepts that underlie it, without sound methods to measure it, good empirical research that enables cross-cutting analysis will not emerge. Much research on collective action has not gone as far as measuring net benefits or impact, but where attempts have been made, little has been done to evaluate those methods. Nevertheless, some methods for measuring collective action that have been undertaken thus far have actually been shown to be fairly crude and to fail to capture important dimensions. More rigorous methods are beginning to emerge, but as yet they are quite new and have not been widely disseminated in the research community.

The appropriate approach to collective action studies depends on the purpose of the study. Is it an exercise to identify the determinants of a specific collective action? To assess the outcomes and impact of collective action? To identify the importance of collective action compared with other factors? Will the focus be on collective action for one particular purpose (e.g., natural resource management), or all forms of collective action in a community? Each of these can contribute to general knowledge, and have practical applications for development projects, by showing the contexts in which group-based approaches are likely to succeed or the extent of impact that can be expected. However, such studies tend to be detached, in contrast to more engaged studies seeking to catalyse or enhance collective action for a particular purpose. The research methods for each of these types of studies will differ.

This special issue provides a collection of papers that use different methods for studying collective action for natural resource management. The focus of the papers is twofold: to explain in detail methods used to study collective action, and to provide an example of the application of the methods. They are a selection of the papers presented at the workshop on methods for studying collective action held in Nyeri, Kenya, in February 2002, convened by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) System-wide Program on Property Rights and Collective Action (CAPRi) and hosted by the World Agroforestry Centre. The workshop gathered more than 40 researchers from CGIAR centres, national research partners, and a number of other experts to present theoretical work as well as case studies. The aim of the workshop was to review different approaches to study collective action in natural resource management and poverty reduction, examine strengths and weaknesses of each, investigate possible integration, and provide guidelines for further research.

There are three major problems that researchers encounter when studying collective action:

  • conceptualising collective action;

  • developing an analytical framework for studying collective action;

  • operationalising the framework for empirical research.

The following sections of this overview paper discuss these issues in turn.

Section snippets

Conceptualising collective action

It is not our intention here to restrict the definition of collective action to one possible wording. Nonetheless, it is important to define the domain of the concept of collective action, so that when researchers from various disciplines interact they have a common understanding. Marshall (1998) defines collective action as an “action taken by a group (either directly or on its behalf through an organisation) in pursuit of members’ perceived shared interests”. This is not the best and only

Developing an analytical framework

A framework for analysing collective action must take into account the large number of variables affecting collective action, the feedback relationships among many variables of interest (Agrawal, 2002), and the adaptive nature of both collective action and its object, e.g., the state of, and management over, many natural resources (Wilson, 2002). Here, we will focus only on a few of these aspects that are relevant for the studies presented in this issue.

Clearly defining concepts, outcomes,

Operationalising the concept of collective action

Two issues complicate operationalising the concept of collective action. First, because collective action is a dynamic process that relates to social relationships, it is inherently difficult to measure directly. As a result, proxy indicators are generally used. However, because the manifestations of collective action can vary over time and also across cultures and communities, it is difficult to find comparable measures across sites and study periods. Formal collective action that takes place

Conclusions

Many policies and projects for rural development that are supported by numerous governments, donors and development agencies today, for agriculture, natural resource management, marketing, microfinance, and service delivery, are based on the premise that people will cooperate at the local level, or even across different policy levels. In order to avoid the failures of the earlier community-based development programmes, it is important to base these policies on sound theoretical and empirical

Acknowledgements

The authors thank all participants of the 2002 “International workshop on methods for studying collective action” organised by CAPRi and hosted by the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, whose intellectual input has influenced the preparation of the paper. A special thanks to Frank Place for substantial input on specific sections of the paper, and to Brent Swallow and Bonnie McCay for helpful comments. The authors are solely responsible for any inaccuracy.

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