Envisioning collective action for sustainable agriculture: An economic experiment

Visions and visioning processes have acquired prominence for sustainability transformations in agriculture for setting desirable goals, strategic pathways and necessary motivations. Participatory vision building (PVB) helps create inspiring and meaningful shared visions of socially desirable futures. We evaluate its distinctive effect through an economic framed field experiment with 684 farmers from an Andean water resource system whose conservation they rely on. Participants had to choose between two farming practices over several rounds, with impacts on their earnings and their shared lake. In a PVB treatment, participants imagined and discussed their desired future. In the other experimental conditions, participants discussed their desired future under an imposed vision or simply discussed their desired goals and/or practices. We find no distinctive effect associated with PVB. Individual and group cooperation were higher in PVB groups, but cooperation decayed, and we cannot statistically reject the null hypothesis that cooperation was the same across conditions. Plausibly, PVB's potential effects on frustration and sadness, and its lack of a distinctive effect on trust, may have undermined PVB's distinctive effect. Although we may have the power to detect PVB's distinctive effect if it were medium or large, we may lack the power to detect it if it were small. These aspects, not noisy data or implementation failure, seem the most plausible explanations for our null results. Future research should thus focus on PVB methods that address potential frustration and mistrust upfront, and contexts such as asymmetric groups where PVB's potential to harmonise conflicting interests may be particularly large.