Where does collective action collide?

The finding that self-interested individuals in a large group will not act to advance a shared interest, even when every member would gain, because each can enjoy the collective good whether or not they help pay for it. Olson's 1965 The Logic of Collective Action argued that a rational member of a large latent group has no incentive to contribute to a public good, since one person's effort barely changes the outcome and no one can be excluded from the result, so such groups under-provide the good unless a selective incentive, a private reward or penalty tied to contributing, is attached. The referent is the free-rider problem itself, the gap between what a group would choose together and what its members choose alone.[1]

Unit

A group's failure to provide a good all its members want

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By whether a latent group supplies a public good, and how provision falls as group size rises

The demonstration that communities can govern a shared resource sustainably on their own, without either privatising it or handing it to the state, when the users craft and enforce their own rules. Studying fisheries, forests, pastures, and irrigation systems, Ostrom's 1990 Governing the Commons drew out design principles common to long-enduring institutions, clear boundaries, rules matched to local conditions, collective-choice arrangements, monitoring, graduated sanctions, and conflict-resolution mechanisms, that let appropriators resist the temptation to free-ride. Her 1999 review Coping with tragedies of the commons set these findings against the assumption that resource users are norm-free maximisers who cannot cooperate. The referent is the same free-rider problem, solved from below rather than assumed away.[2][3]

Unit

A community's capacity to sustain a common-pool resource by self-governance

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By the survival of local institutions and the condition of the resource they manage

Collective action in contentious politics, the mobilisation of people into sustained joint action against opponents, and the interpretive work that makes it possible. In the framing tradition, Benford and Snow's 2000 review Framing Processes and Social Movements treated the collective action frame, a shared way of naming a grievance, assigning blame, and calling for a response, as one of the central dynamics of movements alongside resource mobilisation and political opportunity. Here the problem is not only the individual calculus of contributing but how organisers turn latent discontent into participation. The referent is collective action as a social process, in which framing, identity, and organisation overcome the reasons not to join.[4]

Unit

The mobilisation of individuals into sustained joint action

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By participation, movement emergence, and the resonance of collective action frames

Collective action as it behaves in the laboratory, where subjects in a public-goods game privately choose how much of an endowment to place in a common pot that is multiplied and shared, so that contributing is individually costly but collectively best. Fehr and Gachter's 2000 Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments found that people contribute far more than the free-riding prediction at first, that contributions decay toward zero over repeated rounds as conditional cooperators react to free-riders, and that letting participants pay to punish defectors reverses the decay and sustains high cooperation. The referent is the same problem made measurable, a controlled setting in which contribution rates, their decline, and the effect of sanctions can be observed directly.[5]

Unit

A player's contribution to a shared pot in a public-goods game

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By contribution rates across rounds, with and without the option to punish