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Breakdown in Pakistan

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................................................ixPreface........................................................................................................xi1 Revisiting the Collective Action Dilemma.....................................................................12 Intrinsic or Extrinsic Incentives: The Evolution of Cooperative Groups in Pakistan...........................283 Why Cooperate? Motives and Decisions of Initiators and Joiners in Other-Regarding Groups.....................544 Why Cooperate? Motives and Decisions of Initiators and Joiners in Self-Regarding Groups......................955 Does Aid Break Down Cooperation?.............................................................................1196 Why Aid Breaks Down Cooperation..............................................................................1437 Fixing Incentives: The Way Forward...........................................................................167Glossary.......................................................................................................187Bibliography...................................................................................................189Index..........................................................................................................207

Chapter One

The fundamental theoretical problem underlying the question of cooperation is the manner by which individuals attain knowledge of each others preferences and likely behavior. Moreover, the problem is one of common knowledge, since each individual, i, is required not only to have information about others preferences, but also to know that the others have knowledge about i's own preferences and strategies. Norman Schofield, "anarchy, altruism and cooperation: a review," 1985, 218

Further, communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 1990, 1

THE RURAL AREAS OF SINDH, the southern province of Pakistan, harbor a rich tradition of voluntarism. These rural communities have traditionally supported a large number of voluntary organizations through which community members have pooled resources, at times for charity and at other times to address a collective need. These organizations are known to be much more effective than the state in responding to emergencies; they are particularly good at mobilizing local donations and volunteers. In the 1980s, Oxfam Pakistan initiated a civil society-strengthening program to provide small grants to some of these organizations. The program was premised on the assumption that placing additional financial resources at the disposal of these groups would, in combination with some capacity-building, enable them to expand their work and improve their efficiency. The outcomes were, however, unexpected. Within a year, the groups supported by Oxfam had lost most of their members. Those who were still attached had split into factions, and the hostility that marked these new alliances was starkly visible in the court cases that some members had filed against each other. The welfare work carried out by these groups was a thing of the past.

This story of the negative impact of aid on local community-based collective action structures in rural Sindh is not unique. Many similarities are contained in the story of donor-and NGO-led programs designed to introduce new methods for cultivating quinoa, a traditional crop harvested by smallholder farmers in the highlands of Bolivia. Starting in the 1990s, many donors launched such initiatives under their livelihood-support and income-generation programs, to improve the income of the smallholder farmers. New technologies for cultivation were introduced; for example, farmers were provided with access to modern machines, such as tractors, for use in replacing traditional cultivation practices. Despite increasing the overall yield and the income of these farmers in the short term, the long-term impact of these programs has been markedly detrimental. The support provided by the donors led to a significant decrease in cooperation among the farmers; the resulting individualization and monetarization of agricultural practices restricts the community's ability to play its role of "collective fertility regulator" (Puschiasis 2009), and the unchecked mechanization of agriculture threatens the fragile stability of the ecological and social systems. In recent years there has been growing evidence of soil erosion, which is restricting the yield, and the strong social ties that sustained the cultivation of this crop have been replaced with feuds over land.

In rural Aceh, Indonesia, community members had long participated in many collectively beneficial activities, such as road work and cleaning water drainage systems, under the rubric of Gotong Royong, a traditional institution of collective action. Upon the introduction of cash-for-work schemes by international NGOs (INGOs) and multilateral organizations as part of the reconstruction work in tsunami-hit areas, these activities ceased. The cash-for-work schemes had aimed to rehabilitate the local communities by providing short-term employment opportunities that would generate household income and stimulate the rebuilding of the rural and small-scale infrastructure necessary for commerce and the delivery of essential public services (Thorburn 2007). Instead, these schemes led to the erosion of the patterns of voluntary cooperation that the villagers had traditionally manifested in carrying out these activities. By the end of 2005, many practices that had long been sustained as part of Gotong Royong had altogether disappeared from Ache (Brusset et al. 2006). By developing a typology of seven forms of activity undertaken under Gotong Royong, ranging from volunteering time to harvesting the fields to taking part in youth cleaning groups, Ewert (2010) shows that the activities that received support under the cash-for-work program were discontinued after the introduction of these schemes, even though the village leaders themselves continually attempted to organize these activities. The possibility that the tsunami itself led to the collapse of the structures that traditionally facilitated this collective action is ruled out in light of the evidence that these activities did not stop immediately; rather, they remained markedly robust for a significant period after the tsunami, disappearing only after the cash-for-work scheme had been in place for a couple of months (Ewert 2010).

All three of the traditional institutions of collective action noted earlier drew on historic patterns and ties of collective action that had evolved and survived in these communities over many centuries, but all three registered dramatic shifts in the members' willingness to contribute to the group when aid was received. Further, these shifts occurred within only a few months or a year. In all three cases, development interventions that introduced cash incentives with the aim...