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Do informal institutions, rules, and norms created and enforced by social groups promote good local governance in environments of weak democratic or bureaucratic institutions? This question is difficult to answer because of challenges in defining and measuring informal institutions and identifying their causal effects. In the article, we investigate the effect of lineage groups, one of the most important vehicles of informal institutions in rural China, on local public goods expenditure. Using a panel dataset of 220 Chinese villages from 1986 to 2005, we find that village leaders from the two largest family clans in a village increased local public investment considerably. This association is stronger when the clans appeared to be more cohesive. We also find that clans helped local leaders overcome the collective action problem of financing public goods, but there is little evidence suggesting that they held local leaders accountable.

Marx discussed institutional innovations in the context of a complex dynamic between inter versus intra-group opportunism, which contains clues for understanding how capacity for class agency develops. His lengthy discussion of the English Factory Acts in his Vol. I of Capital is an important case in point, which the paper revisits for its broader lessons not only for how institutions solve collective action problems but also how they become self-enforcing when third party enforcement is ineffective. The paper gives an account of how the Acts could have become self-enforcing at a time when the state enforcement capacity was rudimentary at best. The argument focuses on the dynamic between inter versus intra-class opportunism, shedding analytical light on how organized labor could help capitalists bolster their capacity for class agency.

Abstract We examine the role of collective actions as supporting elements of a long-lasting sustainable food supply chain. This article's main contribution is to link the idea of sustainable supply chains and the collective action problem (horizontal coordination) that may be required in order to deal with externalities related to the provision of sustainable products. In addition, we analyze how the presence or absence of government incentives shapes collective action in the food industry. We base our analysis in a simple formal argument inspired by case studies regarding sustainable farming in Brazil and the Netherlands. Results show that horizontal mechanisms of cooperation maintain positive levels of sustainability, even in the absence of direct payments by the government.

32 pages.-- JEL-Classification: D70, D72, D74. ; We extend the model of collective action in which groups compete for a budged by endogenizing the group platform, namely the specific mixture of public/private good and the distribution of the private good to group members which can be uniform or performance-based. While the group-optimal platform contains a degree of publicness that increases in group size and divides the private benefits uniformly, a success-maximizing leader uses incentives and distorts the platform towards more private benefits - a distortion that increases with group size. In both settings we obtain the anti-Olson type result that win probability increases with group size. ; This paper is part of the Polarization and Con ict Project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission-DG Research Sixth Framework Programme. J.E. is member of the Barcelona GSE Research Network funded by the Government of Catalonia. Financial support from the CICYT project n. SEJ2006-00369. E.H. acknowledges financial support from the CICYT project n. SEJ2006-01717 and the support of the Barcelona GSE Research Network and the government of Catalonia. ; Peer reviewed

AbstractThe ability to cooperate in collective action problems – such as those relating to the use of common property resources or the provision of local public goods – is a key determinant of economic performance. In this paper we discuss two aspects of collective action problems in developing countries. First, which institutions discourage opportunistic behaviour and promote cooperation? Second, what are the characteristics of the individuals involved that determine the degree to which they cooperate? We first review the evidence from field studies, laboratory experiments, and cross community studies. We then present new results from an individual level panel dataset of rural workers.

A review essay on books by (1) Margaret E. Keck & Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 1998); (2) Dani Rodrik, Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (Washington, DC: Instit International Economics, 1997); & (3) Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1994). Globalization studies have sparked lively debates about how the changing international environment has catalyzed collective action. This review of three agenda-setting books concludes that globalization's impact on collective action is more indeterminate than current scholarship suggests. Future research needs to parse out descriptive treatments of globalization from globalization as a causal framework & to pay greater attention to causal mechanisms, relevant cases, & politicization of identities to address better the structured & contingent relations among international processes, the state, & collective action. Adapted from the source document.

This book explains why the global community has been successful in correcting some recent large-scale problems, but has failed in addressing others. The analysis reaches from antibiotic-resistant microbes to greenhouse gases, from civil wars to international terrorism, and from the polluted atmospheres of cities to the depths of outer space