Behavioral Determinants of Citizen Involvement: Evidence from Natural Resource Decentralization Policy

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12249
Published date01 September 2014
AuthorEric A. Coleman
Date01 September 2014
Eric A. Coleman is assistant professor
in the Department of Political Science at
Florida State University. His research focuses
on the local participation and management
of common-pool resources.
E-mail: ecoleman@fsu.edu
642 Public Administration Review • September | October 2014
Public Administration Review,
Vol. 74, Iss. 5, pp. 642–654. © 2014 by
The American Society for Public Administration.
DOI: 10.1111/puar.12249.
Eric A. Coleman
Florida State University
is article examines the robustness of citizen
involvement in decentralized governance. It develops two
behavioral theories of citizen involvement and examines
their relative explanatory power with survey data
collected from subsistence households in forest-dependent
communities in Bolivia, Kenya, Mexico, and Uganda.
Counterintuitively, the analysis f‌i nds that households that
have been engaged with collective action the longest are
the most likely to disengage from decentralized institu-
tions once they confront crises.  is result is interpreted in
light of psychological self-licensing theory: people justify
noninvolvement with decentralization precisely because
of their past ef‌f ort.  is result implies that policies that
rely on local involvement may be unsustainable insofar
as they fail to address the underlying vulnerability of
local users. In order to ensure that citizen involvement
with decentralized governance is consistent and ef‌f ective,
policies need to address the structural factors that make
users vulnerable to crises.
The question of why citizens become involved
in the policy process has occupied public
administration scholars for some time (Yang
and Pandey 2011). In particular, much research seeks
to understand citizen involvement in systems with
political and administrative decentralization (Devas
and Grant 2003; Escobar-Lemmon and Ross 2014;
Hart 1972). Robust citizen involvement with decen-
tralized policy is important for two reasons (Yang and
Pandey 2011). First, it is instrumental to ensure that
local policy makers are accountable to citizens—a
prerequisite to meeting other decentralization objec-
tives, such as curtailing corruption, mitigating elite
capture, reducing economic and social inequality, and
improving sustainable resource
use (Escobar-Lemmon and
Ross 2014; Faguet 2014; Ribot,
Agrawal, and Larson 2006).
Second, citizen involvement is
fundamentally an important—if
not the primary— objective of
decentralization itself (Agrawal,
Chhatre, and Hardin 2008;
Andersson, Gibson, and Lehoucq 2004; Andersson
and Van Laerhoven 2007): as citizens become
involved, they develop local political networks that
can “sever paternalistic relationships with the cen-
tral state” and thus promote democracy from below
(Taylor 1998, 129).
But why do citizens sacrif‌i ce their ongoing time and
energy to engage with decentralized policy making?
Citizen involvement poses a collective action dilemma:
people, in general, will benef‌i t from the involvement
of others, but it is individually costly to become
involved oneself.  us, each citizen has an incentive
to free ride on the ef‌f orts of others. As Olson (1965)
demonstrates, few citizens become involved in the pol-
icy-making process, and the little citizen involvement
that does exist tends to be dominated by elites (Boone
2003; Dye, Schubert, and Zeigler 2012). Research in
American politics, for example, consistently shows that
citizens with high socioeconomic status are more likely
to participate in politics (Leighley 1995), especially
to the extent that those with status have the necessary
time, resources, and civic skills (Brady, Verba, and
Schlozman 1995). Despite this empirical regularity,
many theorists see broad citizen involvement as neces-
sary for sustainable local governance in complex policy
environments (Agarwal 2010; Agrawal and Gupta
2005; Wester, Merrey, and de Lange 2003).
Institutional approaches to the problem of citizen
involvement tend to emphasize that people will
respond to material incentives; policy changes that
alter these incentives can make involvement more
instrumentally worthwhile for citizens (Hardin 1982;
Olson 1965; Ostrom 1990).
Behavioral approaches to the
problem, on the other hand,
tend to emphasize the impor-
tance of nonmaterial psychic
incentives (Andreoni 1995;
De Rooij, Green, and Gerber
2009; Ostrom 1998). It is fair
to say that the extant evidence
Behavioral Determinants of Citizen Involvement: Evidence
from Natural Resource Decentralization Policy
Citizen involvement poses a col-
lective action dilemma: people,
in general, will benef‌i t from the
involvement of others, but it is
individually costly to become
involved oneself.

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