Would improving the economic, social, and political condition of the world's disadvantaged people slow--or accelerate--environmental degradation? In Inequality, Cooperation, and Environmental Sustainability , leading social scientists provide answers to this difficult question, using new research on the impact of inequality on environmental sustainability. The contributors' findings suggest that inequality may exacerbate environmental problems by making it more difficult for individuals, groups, and nations to cooperate in the design and enforcement of measures to protect natural assets ranging from local commons to the global climate. But a more equal division of a given amount of income could speed the process of environmental degradation--for example, if the poor value the preservation of the environment less than the rich do, or if the consumption patterns of the poor entail proportionally greater environmental degradation than that of the rich. The contributors also find that the effect of inequality on cooperation and environmental sustainability depends critically on the economic and political institutions governing how people interact, and the technical nature of the environmental asset in question. The contributors focus on the local commons because many of the world's poorest depend on them for their livelihoods, and recent research has made great strides in showing how private incentives, group governance, and government policies might combine to protect these resources. " Inequality, Cooperation and Environmental Sustainability is a highly valuable book, rich in information, innovative in approach, eminently readable (if not suitable to the undergraduate student) and relevant to a wide scholarship interested in environmental commons and sustainability issues." ---Luigi Pellizzoni, Sociologica "This is an excellent volume: a cutting-edge compilation that brings together a wide variety of disciplines (from anthropology to economics), methods (from village-level studies to agent-based modeling), and cases (from Colombia to India)." ―Clark Gibson, University of California, San Diego "This is an excellent volume: a cutting-edge compilation that brings together a wide variety of disciplines (from anthropology to economics), methods (from village-level studies to agent-based modeling), and cases (from Colombia to India)." --Clark Gibson, University of California, San Diego Jean-Marie Baland is Professor of Economics at the University of Namur in Belgium. Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Samuel Bowles is Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Professor of Economics at the University of Siena. Inequality, Cooperation, and Environmental Sustainability By Jean-Marie Baland Pranab Bardhan & Samuel Bowles Princeton University Press Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-691-12879-5 Chapter One INTRODUCTION Jean-Marie Baland, Pranab Bardhan, and Samuel Bowles Does inequality exacerbate environmental problems? Would an equalization of wealth, social status, and political power contribute to environmental sustainability? Or is environmental degradation a likely byproduct of efforts to advance the economic, social, and political interests of the less well-off? In this book, we investigate the impact of inequality on environmental sustainability. We focus on local commons as they are essential to the livelihoods of many of the world's poorest people, and because recent research illuminates how private incentives, group governance, and government policies might combine to better protect these essential resources. At a local level users interact in a structure called social dilemmas, in which the pursuit of individual material gain in exploiting the commons enters into conflict with the general interest. Local environmental degradation often results from a failure by members of the community to cooperate in its protection. For this reason we give special attention to the effect that inequality may have on cooperation. The problem is often termed the "tragedy of the commons." However, many communities have managed common resources with great success over hundreds of years. Maine lobstermen limit their catch by means of local restrictions on who can set traps where. Turkish fishermen allocate fishing spots by lot and then rotate them (Ostrom 1990, Acheson 1988). Successful cooperation to protect forestry and water resources has also been documented (Bromley and Feeny 1992). But failures are also too common. Moreover, many studies of "collective action" potentially suffer from a selection bias, as failures are often harder to observe. "Success stories" of local cooperation may thus be overrepresented. 1.1. Collective Action and the Tragedy of the Commons To blame inequality when the tragedy of the commons unfolds, one needs to know how inequality affects the ability and the incenti