Institutions and Natural Resources Sustainability in Poor Socio-Ecological Systems: Closing some Dynamical Loops

The goal of this paper is proposing an alternative strategy to analyze the relationships between institutions and common-pool resources management in small rural communities in less developed countries. It will be suggested that the cross-section statistical methods used in almost all the quantitative researches in the field, due to difficulties related mainly to the endogeneity among variables, seem little promising in helping to answer some recent important criticisms. The main reason is that the relationships among institutions, population and common resources are, for their own nature, endogenous, and therefore trying “to correct†this problem would mean discarding the more relevant mechanisms and processes involved. The methodology to be adopted – system dynamics – emphasizes exactly the most relevant endogenous causal chains in poor socio-ecological systems (PSES) dynamics. In order to test the hypotheses to be formulated it will be suggested a methodology that emphasizes not the comparison among cases but the time dynamics of specific cases, that is a (kind of) time series approach instead of the cross-section approach traditionally used in applied studies on commons.