Non-kinship successors for resource sustainability

Rural societies with unique resources, such as indigenous culture and natural capitals, have suffered from aging residents and lack of successors due to youth outmigration by industrialization, urbanization and globalization. Little literature has studied resource transfers when successors are present or absent in such an aging society. This paper experimentally examines resource dynamics and sustainability when resource users may die with and without successors. We design a dynamic common pool resource (CPR) game and implement the field experiments in Nepalese rural areas where an aging factor of resource users with presence or absence of successors is incorporated by probabilistic exit and entry of members in a group. In the experiments, three treatments are prepared: (i) fixed group member (FGM) treatment where group members are fixed without exit, (ii) probabilistic replacement member (PRM) treatment where each group member shall stochastically exit, but a successor exists to fill the spot as a replacement and (iii) probabilistic exit member (PEM) treatment where each group member shall stochastically exit in each period. The results show that groups in FGM and PRM treatments sustain resources 3.13 and 2.52 times longer than do groups in PEM (baseline), demonstrating that resource users tend to maintain resources and cooperate for sustainability when they have successors or live long together in one place. The results also suggest that an existence of non-kinship successors can be key to trigger people’s altruistic motives for outliving themselves or leaving something behind even in an aging society, affecting how resource users behave for not only intragenerational peers but also intergenerational resource sustainability.