Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/323849 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Version Description: 
This version: August 2025
Publisher: 
ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Kiel, Hamburg
Abstract: 
Sustainable resource management often requires collective action to overcome social dilemmas, which participatory approaches can foster. Participatory vision building (PVB) helps the relevant stakeholders envision, experience and build a shared vision of their desired future. We evaluate its potential through a framed lab-in-the-field experiment. In the experiment, 728 farmers from Lake Tota, Colombia, were asked to choose between two farming practices over several rounds, which impacted their earnings and the shared lake’s water levels. In a PVB treatment condition, participants imagined and discussed their desired future. To assess PVB’s distinctive effect, the control conditions capture the elements that PVB shares with other participatory approaches. In these, participants only discussed their desired outcomes and/or practices, with or without an external vision. We find that individual and group cooperation were relatively higher in PVB but statistically indistinguishable across conditions. On average, cooperation decayed similarly across all conditions. Exploratory analyses suggest significant differences in discussion themes, feelings (of inspiration, frustration, and sadness), and participants’ unilateral prosocial actions, but not in beliefs about others' (expected) cooperation. Although PVB might motivate initial cooperation and even foster unilateral prosocial behaviour, it may fail to prevent frustration and nurture the trust necessary to sustain cooperation.
Subjects: 
social dilemmas
collective action
natural resource management
participatory processes
participatory governance
visioning
vision-building
participatory vision-building
JEL: 
C93
D70
D91
Q25
Q50
Additional Information: 
Previous version: 30 July 2024 under the title Envisioning collective action for sustainable resource management: An economic experiment.(https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/300582)
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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