| The thread tying together the diverse research projects reported here is the theme of cooperation in the context of the use and management of biological resources. Each of the three papers that follow addresses aspects of this problem and uses different sets of methodologies to do so. The first, "Closing the commons: cooperation for gain or restraint?", is primarily an ethnographic account of the rules and institutions used by an Eastern Indonesian community to collectively manage their stock of Trochus niloticus, a marine gastropod that is the source of mother-of-pearl shell. The theme of this paper, that of understanding who benefits from community management, is more explicitly developed in a second paper, "Are East African pastoralists truly conservationist?" In this latter paper, co-authored with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, a game theoretical model is developed to explore the conditions that would lead wealthy or poor herders to conserve grazing lands. The findings are then compared against an empirical description of herding strategies used by Barabaig pastoralists in Tanzania. In the third and final paper, "Ecological correlates to information sharing among commercial fishermen", the ecological conditions that favor cooperative resource use strategies are examined in the context of commercial fisheries. In the first part of this paper, hypotheses about the broad conditions favoring information sharing are tested against a secondary data set comprised of reports drawn primarily from the literature. In the second portion, more specific predictions about the benefits to be received from cooperating are tested with a statistical analysis of logbook records from the Pacific whiting fishery in Oregon. |
