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Abstract

Vol. 61, No. 4, pp. 289-301 (2010)

“Collective Action for Irrigation Management -A Case Study of Rural Yunnan, China-”
Junichi Ito (Policy Research Institute, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries)

The major objectives of this paper are to present hypotheses regarding collective action for irrigation management and to verify them empirically, based on data collected by the author in rural Yunnan, China. It turns out that the evolutionary game theory is very useful for this purpose. An econometric analysis corroborates these hypotheses by revealing that collective action will be forthcoming in a rural community, where few non-farm job opportunities are provided, the resource restriction is moderately problematic, farmland is frequently reallocated among households, the degree of income disparity among farmers is quite small, and the irrigation game is linked to a variety of social exchange games. In other words, communities that do not meet these conditions are likely to suffer from prisoner’s dilemma and the management of local commons ends in tragedy. The relationship between group size and collective action is ambiguously determined in our theoretical model, but there exists an inverse “U-shape” relationship, due to the imperfect exclusion and lumpiness in the technology of third-party monitoring.