Participatory vision-building for collective action and sustainable resource management Assessing its potential through an economic experiment

Sustainable resource management often requires collective action to overcome social dilemmas, which participatory approaches can foster. Participatory vision building (PVB) helps the relevant stakeholders envision, experience and build a shared vision of their desired future. We evaluate its potential through a framed lab-in-the-field experiment. In the experiment, 728 farmers from Lake Tota, Colombia, were asked to choose between two farming practices over several rounds, which impacted their earnings and the shared lake’s water levels. In a PVB treatment condition, participants imagined and discussed their desired future. To assess PVB’s distinctive effect, the control conditions capture the elements that PVB shares with other participatory approaches. In these, participants only discussed their desired outcomes and/or practices, with or without an external vision. We find that individual and group cooperation were relatively higher in PVB but statistically indistinguishable across conditions. On average, cooperation decayed similarly across all conditions. Exploratory analyses suggest significant differences in discussion themes, feelings (of inspiration, frustration, and sadness), and participants’ unilateral prosocial actions, but not in beliefs about others' (expected) cooperation. Although PVB might motivate initial cooperation and even foster unilateral prosocial behaviour, it may fail to prevent frustration and nurture the trust necessary to sustain cooperation.