Baggio, Jacopo

Successful management of natural resources is crucial, especially when these resources are shared among multiple stakeholders. However, understanding which key factors favors the sustainable management of resources is difficult. While the literature abounds of individual cases, synthesis of these empirical studies is often hampered by cost and time. Here we leverage current advances in natural language processing and large language models in order to analyze the relationship between Ostrom Institutional Design principles with conflict, inequality and the state of natural resources in over 2000 published articles. By assessing the importance of Ostrom institutional design principles (DPs), we propose blueprints for success for different contexts. Our results contribute to the literature in two important ways: 1) furthering the synthesis related to common pool resources facilitating the understanding of which institutional arrangements increase the likelihood of success in different contexts; 2) methodologically, increase our ability to synthesize the literature in order to provide actionable information to policy makers and practitioners.

The governance of shared resources by diverse groups underlies every key sustainability challenge in the modern world. Yet, researchers struggle to understand when and how the basic principles that foster the effective governance of shared resources in small groups can scale-up to large populations with diverse beliefs and interests. To help fill this knowledge gap, in this paper we propose an embedded Model of Adaptive Capacity (the eACM). The eACM synthesizes basic insights from resource economics, team dynamics, and the behavioral science of stress to advance our understanding of how the effective governance of shared resources emerges across scales. The eACM proposes that the adaptive capacity of groups depends on key feedbacks between the stress responses of individuals, the impact of stress on group cognition, and changes in the structure and availability of shared resources. Here, we build a computational model to investigate the consequences of these basic feedback dynamics. We find that convergence towards joint solutions increases the ability of groups to adapt to changing environments and manage common pool resources sustainably. However, the achievement of a joint solution depends on a narrow window of stress arousal, a group's ability to assess resources, and a group's ability to communicate and diffuse conflict effectively. These results generate hypotheses for future empirical studies of effective resource governance.