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

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12249
• Published date: 01 September 2014
• Author: Eric A. Coleman
• Date: 01 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.