Achievement

Trainee Brian Robinson is researching how villages manage their extraction of natural resources, specifically non-timber forest products (NTFPs). He compared the age distributions of wild-harvested matsutake mushrooms from 13 villages that have one of three village-level management institutions: open (public) access, common (village) access and private (household) access. Open and common access villages perform worse than the private access villages but, surprisingly, open-access villages consistently display more efficient harvests relative to common-access villages. This research shows that "open access" is not necessarily indicative of resource degradation as is commonly assumed and can be a conscious village management decision. The creation and maintenance of natural resource management institutions is costly; when villages gain little from a self-imposed institution, it is not likely to be resilient within a community.