Effects of experience with access regimes on stewardship behaviors of small-scale fishers.

Governance regimes that assign exclusive access to support collective action are increasingly promoted to manage common-pool resources under the premise that they foster environmental stewardship. However, experimental evidence linked to existing policies that support this premise is lacking. Overlapping access policies in small-scale fisheries provide a unique opportunity to test the effects of access regimes on users' stewardship behaviors. We performed a lab-in-the-field experiment to assess how fishers' previous experience with access regimes relates to compliance and peer enforcement (n = 120). Fishers' compliance and peer-enforcement decisions were compared in a common-pool-resource game. Treatments differed in framing to represent exclusive access and pseudo-open access regimes, both of which fishers face in real life. To contrast behavior in the game with real-life observations, we compared fishers' associations that have shown relatively high and low management performance under exclusive access policies. Compliance and peer enforcement were higher under the exclusive access treatment than under the pseudo-open access treatment only for fishers' associations with high management performance in real life. Behaviors in the game reflected differences between associations in real life. Our results support previous research on ocean governance by experimentally assessing the role of access regimes in determining users' stewardship and suggest potential mechanisms for stewardship internalization.

Efectos de la experiencia con regímenes de acceso sobre comportamientos de gestión responsable de pescadores a pequeña escala Resumen Las políticas que asignan acceso exclusivo a grupos de usuarios para apoyar la acción colectiva son cada vez más promovidas para el manejo de recursos de uso comunitario bajo la premisa de que fomentan la gestión ambiental responsable. Sin embargo, la evidencia experimental vinculada a políticas existentes que respalde esta premisa es insuficiente. La superposición de diversas políticas de acceso en las pesquerías a pequeña escala proporciona una oportunidad única para analizar los efectos de los regímenes de acceso sobre el comportamiento de gestión de los usuarios. Realizamos un experimento, llevando el laboratorio al campo, para evaluar cómo la experiencia previa de los pescadores con regímenes de acceso se relaciona con sus comporatamientos de cumplimiento y de sanción de pares (n = 120). Comparamos el cumplimiento con cutoas de extracción de los pescadores y sus decisiones de sancionar a pares que incumplian las cuotas en un juego de recursos de uso comunitario entre dos tratamientos. Los tratamientos variaban en la contextualización del juego para representar una pesquería de acceso exclusivo y una de pseudo libre acceso, a las que se enfrentan los pescadores en la vida real. Para contrastar el comportamiento en el juego con las observaciones de la vida real, comparamos los resultados de asociaciones de pescadores que han mostrado un desempeño de manejo relativamente alto y bajo con las políticas de acceso exclusivo. El cumplimiento y la sanción de pares fueron mayores bajo el tratamiento de acceso exclusivo que bajo el de pseudo libre acceso sólo para aquellas asociaciones de pescadores con un alto desempeño de manejo en la vida real. Los comportamientos en el juego reflejaron las diferencias entre las asociaciones en la vida real. Nuestros resultados respaldan investigaciones previas sobre la governanza de recursos marinos mediante la evaluación experimental del papel que tienen las políticas de acceso en la determinación de la gestión del usuario y sugieren mecanismos potenciales para la internalización de dicha gestión.

No association between genetic variants in MAOA, OXTR, and AVPR1a and cooperative strategies.

The effort to understand the genetic basis of human sociality has been encouraged by the diversity and heritability of social traits like cooperation. This task has remained elusive largely because most studies of sociality and genetics use sample sizes that are often unable to detect the small effects that single genes may have on complex social behaviors. The lack of robust findings could also be a consequence of a poor characterization of social phenotypes. Here, we explore the latter possibility by testing whether refining measures of cooperative phenotypes can increase the replication of previously reported associations between genetic variants and cooperation in small samples. Unlike most previous studies of sociality and genetics, we characterize cooperative phenotypes based on strategies rather than actions. Measuring strategies help differentiate between similar actions with different underlaying social motivations while controlling for expectations and learning. In an admixed Latino sample (n = 188), we tested whether cooperative strategies were associated with three genetic variants thought to influence sociality in humans-MAOA-uVNTR, OXTR rs53576, and AVPR1 RS3. We found no association between cooperative strategies and any of the candidate genetic variants. Since we were unable to replicate previous observations our results suggest that refining measurements of cooperative phenotypes as strategies is not enough to overcome the inherent statistical power problem of candidate gene studies.