Collective action can be highly effective within a community but harder to achieve across communities. This endangers conservation efforts for mobile resources that require widespread collaboration, like fisheries management. People who have friends across communities could help tackle this challenge, according to a study published in Conservation Letters. SFI External Professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (UC Davis), with an international team of colleagues led by Kristopher Smith at the University Washington, surveyed 1,317 residents across 28 Tanzanian fishing villages about participation in beach management activities.
Leaders of village-level fisheries management committees, and those already convinced of the efficacy of conservation efforts, were active participants. More unexpectedly, the authors found that people with friends in other villages were more likely to participate in activities like cleaning beaches, donating labor and money, and preventing destructive fishing, than were comparable individuals without friends in other communities. In addition, they were more trusting of people from other villages to do their part, suggesting that long-distance friendships can catalyze inter-community collective action. Since conservation challenges often extend across community boundaries, further work should probe how this happens as well as address other factors, like the role of gender and representation in leadership roles, that impact collective action.
Read the paper “Long-Distance Friends and Collective Action in Fisheries Management” in Conservation Letters (December 5, 2024). DOI: 10.1111/conl.13073