Studies On The Role Of Fairness Norm In The Community-Based Natural Forest Conservation

Due to the concern with the"tragedy of the commons", the capacity of local communities is usually underrated in common resources management such as natural forest conservation. Nevertheless, the recent theoretical and empirical studies indicated that the individuals'decision-making is bounded-rational and follows social norms such as fairness. As a result, there are debates on the community's potential in governing the common resources.In this study, we first developed a model based on evolutionary game theory in the context of family-contracted natural forest conservation and simulated the evolutionary dynamics of the strategies the local people could choose: cooperator, defector, the tolerant and monitor. The result indicated a counterintuitive outcome that the'rational'players are not able to sustain a high level of cooperation for conservation even given material subsidy especially when it is limited to a comparable size to the costs needed for monitoring; in contrast, improved level of cooperation is predicted if the local people comply with the social norm of fairness and take it as part of the utility other than the self-interests.To verify the prediction of the model, we undertook field experiments based on one-shot anonymous Ultimatum Games with the local communities in Wolong Nature Reserve (WNR), China, where the policy of family-contracted forest conservation has recently made remarkable progress in protecting the habitat of giant pandas. The field experiment lends support to the hypothesis with a result of fair offers from most proposers, while the responders'reluctance to reject low offers and the post-game interviews indicate that the evolution of the local norm of fairness is based on reputation rather than costly punishment.The result well interpreted the success of the forest conservation program in WNR and proved the availability of facilitating the participation and cooperation of the local community in the common resource conservation by crowding in the social norm of fairness.