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Can Development Programs Shape Cooperation?

Results from a Framed Field Experiment in Indonesia

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Abstract

Empirical studies among small-scale societies show that participation in national development programs impact traditional norms of community cooperation. We explore the extent to which varying levels of village and individual involvement in development policies relate to voluntary cooperation within community settings. We used a field experiment conducted in seven villages (208 participants) from an indigenous society in Indonesia known for their strong traditional cooperative norms, the Punan Tubu. We framed the experiment in terms of an ongoing government house-building program. The results indicate that there were synergistic and antagonistic interactions between existing cooperative norms and government development policies. Participants’ cooperation in the experimental setting was low, probably because the Punan Tubu are used to cooperating and sharing both under demand and in a context in which uncooperative behavior is largely unpunished. Variation in experimental behavior was related to both village- and individual-level variables, with participants living in resettlement villages and participants living in a house constructed under the government program displaying more cooperative behavior. The cooperation evident in resettled villages may indicate that people in these villages are more comfortable interacting in anonymous settings and less committed to the demand-sharing norms still prevalent in the upstream villages. The more cooperative behavior among villagers who have previously received a house might indicate that they recognize that they are now better off than others and feel more obliged to cooperate. Policies aiming to capitalize on existing cooperative behavior to stimulate community collective action should consider the specific conditions under which cooperation occurs in real settings since traditional norms that regulate cooperative behavior might not translate well to cooperation in government-led programs.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement FP7-261971-LEK to V. Reyes-García. We express our profound gratitude to all the informants for their willingness to share their time and knowledge. We thank the WWF Indonesia-Malinau, the Department of Economics Universitas Indonesia, and the CIFOR-Bogor for facilitating fieldwork. We also thank M. Guèze, Jonaidi, Widya NP, S. Hadiwijaya, and D. Suan for research assistance at different stages of fieldwork. The authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, through the “María de Maeztu” program for Units of Excellence (MDM-2015-0552).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Ciència Tecnología Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Edifici Z, Carrer de Les Columnes, E-08193, Bellaterra, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain

    Lucentezza Napitupulu, Sonia Graham & Victoria Reyes-García

  2. Department of Economics, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia

    Lucentezza Napitupulu

  3. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), The Hague, Netherlands

    Jetske Bouma

  4. Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain

    Victoria Reyes-García

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  1. Lucentezza Napitupulu
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Correspondence to Victoria Reyes-García.

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Napitupulu, L., Bouma, J., Graham, S. et al. Can Development Programs Shape Cooperation?. Hum Nat 31, 174–195 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09369-2

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