Excerpt

The central question of this paper has never been more important: How do we organize and coordinate our collective action to increase joint benefits and reduce harms? This question is particularly critical now, when institutions we took for granted seem to  be failing, from communication norms and epistemic frameworks to democratic elections and independent  courts, even as our natural and social environments keep on rapidly and irreversibly changing.  How do we  develop new institutions to manage our  collective  response  to catastrophic weather events, biodiversity loss, global pandemics, spread of misinformation, and extensive migration? Can we rely on bottom-up self-organization of autonomous individuals or do we need an externally imposed, top-down governance?

In this seminal 1993 paper, Stephen Lansing and James Kremer describe a wonderful example of the success of bottom-up organization. Groups of farmers growing rice on colorful terraces of Bali need to solve a tradeoff between water shortage and pest damage. If they all plant rice at the same time, there might not be enough water for all farmers, especially for those farther from the central water source. But if they stagger their planting schedule to avoid water shortages, another problem arises: pests. If newly planted fields are always available, pests can migrate from one field to another, causing a lot of damage. To avoid this, farmers should ideally all plant at the same time. Pests would do some damage, but after harvest there would be a long period when there would be nothing for them to eat and they would perish.

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