The research draws on an ethnographic research and explores the everyday practice of collective action in Ugbawka in Enugu State by using interviews and participant observation. The study reveals that smallholder collective action is not best fitted into formal institutional arrangement but takes place within a complex and intricate process that involves interaction with diversity of institutions and actors. Equally, the interactions that occur amongst actors are mediated at the community level through interplay of socio-cultural and political factors. This study recognises and places emphasis on understanding of agency and the exercise of agency at the local level arguing that smallholder farmers are not robot but active individual who exercise their agency purposively or impulsively depending on conditions and the assets available at their disposition as well as their ability to navigate the intricate power dynamic inherent at local context. The thesis thus questioned the simplistic use of formal institutional collective action framework in smallholder collective action at the community level and argues that institutions are not static and do not determine outcomes but are informed by the prevailing conditions at the community level. The study emphasises the role of existing institutions and socially embedded principles in community governance and argues that actors should be the focus of analysis rather than the system in understanding smallholder collective action. The study concludes by advocating for further research that could explore the possibility of hybrid approach that accepts the advantages of both formal and informal institutional forms of smallholder collective action.

[pt] Ondas de protestos pelo mundo têm sido conectadas à disseminação do uso de mídias sociais. Neste artigo, eu investigo os efeitos de mídias sociais sobre os protestos brasileiros de junho de 2013. Para tal, eu exploro o fato de que os eventos aconteceram em alta frequência e em um curto espaço de tempo para identificar o efeito de mídias sociais sobre protestos e mostro que atividade em mídias sociais, através do Twitter, teve impacto positivo sobre protestos, tanto na margem intensiva quanto na margem extensiva. Encontro, para as especificações preferidas, que um aumento de 10 por cento de atividade no Twitter aumenta em 6.7 por cento o número de manifestantes nas ruas e em 3 por cento a probabilidade de um protesto ocorrer. Além disso, ao analisar o conteúdo compartilhado, e a dinâmica das trocas de informação, consigo identificar dois mecanismos por tras desse efeito: difusão de informação e coordenação. Os resultados indicam que mídias sociais afetaram os protestos ao possibilitar uma melhor coordenação entre os indivíduos, e que difusão de informação não foi relevante. / [en] Waves of protests across the world have been linked to the dissemination of social media. In this paper I investigate the effect of social media on protests during the Brazilian protests of June 2013. I exploit the high frequency and short time dimension of the events in order to identify the effect of social media on protests and show that social media activity, through Twitter, positively impacted protesting behavior - attendance and occurrence. I find, for the preferred specifications, that a 10 percent increase in Twitter activity led to an increase of 6.7 percent in the number of protestors in the streets and an increase of 3 percent on the probability of the occurrence of a protest. Furthermore, by analyzing the dynamics of content shared between users, I am able to differentiate between two mechanisms, information diffusion and coordination. Results indicate that more precise coordination was driving the protests through social media, and that information diffusion did not play a role.

Le but principal de la présente thèse est d'étudier le rôle du capital social dans la capacité des communautés locales à entreprendre une action collective et à produire des biens publics locaux par eux-mêmes. Nous étendons la portée des études existantes dans les pays en développement. L'analyse est effectuée en utilisant deux approches distinctes. La première approche utilise un mélange original d'enquêtes et de données expérimentales sur la confiance de quatre villages au Sénégal pour évaluer la capacité de la confiance de prévoir la participation à la fourniture de biens publics locaux. Les résultats montrent que la confiance, tel que mesurée par les questions de l'enquête, a une faible pouvoir prédictif, alors que les résultats d'une mesure expérimentale de confiance sont bien meilleurs prédicteurs de la production de biens publics. La seconde approche consiste à enquêter sur l'impact causal de la confiance dans la qualité des biens publics produits au niveau du district en Afrique. Nous utilisons les données Afro-baromètre pour tester le rôle du capital social et les divisions ethniques dans l'accès aux soins de santé de base et à une scolarisation. Nous contournons les problèmes de la causalité inverse entre la confiance et la qualité des biens publics, et de variables omises en raison de tri ethnique endogène par l'utilisation de données historiques sur les modes de fonctionnement des groupes ethniques en Afrique sub-saharienne. Les résultats que notre mesure de confiance locale (utilisé comme indicateur de capital social) a impact causal sur la qualité de la santé et de la qualité des écoles en Afrique. / The main purpose of the present dissertation is to study the role of social capital in the capacity of local communities to undertake collective action and to produce local public goods by themselves We extend the scope of existing studies encompass in developing countries. The analysis is carried out using two distinct approaches. The first approach uses an original mixture of survey and experimental data on trust from four villages in Senegal to assess the capacity of trust to predict participation in provision of local public good. The results show that trust, as measured by survey questions, has poor predictive power, while the results from a simple experimental measure of trust are much better predictors of public-goods production. The second approach consists in investigating the causal impact of trust in the quality of public goods produced at district level in Africa. We use Afro-barometer data to test the role of social capital and ethnic divisions in determining access to basic health care and schooling. We skirt any reverse-causality problems between trust and the quality of public goods, and omitted-variable bias due to endogenous ethnic sorting, by the use of historical data on the settlement patterns of ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our measure of local trust (used as an indicator of social capital) is shown to have a causal impact access on quality of health and quality of schools in Africa.

vii, 95 p. : ill. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call numbers: KNIGHT HB846.5 .C76 2000 / By traditional economic reasoning, the production and sale of private goods is assumed to be efficient in a pure market because only the owners of privately held goods can access and enjoy them. In contrast, public goods are likely to be under supplied, because individuals can free ride on the contributions of others. Citizens can solve the free rider problem either spontaneously or through the use of coercive tools such as taxation. However, such solutions will rarely be efficient. An alternative solution, seldom studied by political scientists, is the formation of clubs. Clubs exist to provide semi-public goods to their members. If only contributing members of a club can access its product (the club good), the club should be free of the free-rider problem. Because club goods are finite and rivalrous, clubs are subject to "crowding effects"; that is, per-member benefits will decline if clubs grow too large. Clubs can minimize this crowding by limiting the size of their membership. Clubs are traditionally formulated as consumer- driven arrangements, driven solely by the wealth-maximizing preferences of their memberships and not by external concerns. In an experimental setting, this dissertation demonstrates that clubs also tolerate crowding if club membership is the sole source of some club good for otherwise excluded individuals. Club members can minimize the effects of this crowding by making multilateral promises not to overuse the club good. This means that clubs members do consider the social ramifications of the club's membership policies, and those membership policies respond to government action (specifically, the presence of other funding for excluded individuals). This has implications for both the study of clubs and the associations that resemble them: firms, coalitions, and communities. / Committee in charge: Dr. John Orbell, Chair; Dr. Holly Arrow; Dr. Bill Harbaugh; Dr. Ron Mitchell

By pursuing private and collective political action in the nonmarket environment, businesses attempt to influence public policy that shapes their operating environment. This dissertation considers how a firm’s market-based experience and its accumulation of political resources affect how the firm combines private and collective political tactics. Drawing on the resource-based view of the firm (RBV) I investigate how a firm’s alliance experience, political resources and prior collective political experience influence the autonomy of its Corporate Political Activity (CPA). I use fixed effects GLS regression with clustered standard errors to test my model on a panel of 21,329 firm/year observations of 2,779 U.S. property casualty insurance companies over the ten-year period between 2005 and 2014. I find support for the influence of state-level political resources, equity alliances, and the interaction of prior collective CPA experience with regulatory complexity and learning capacity on autonomy. My findings contribute to the growing literature connecting market and non-market strategies by linking collaboration in the political arena to the related market activity of alliance experience. Findings also contribute to our understanding of how participation in a collective provides opportunities for learning, and reveals that taking advantage of this opportunity depends on a firm’s learning capacity and the complexity of its regulatory environment. These findings add insight to the literatures on CPA, inter-organizational learning, collective action and trade associations.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / Esta tese busca analisar os significados da reatualização de práticas e discursos sobre a remoção de favelas atualmente no Rio de Janeiro. Para a realização da pesquisa que resultou neste trabalho acompanhei diversas situações de realocação conduzidas pela prefeitura. Analiticamente, esta tese se articula a partir de três níveis: no primeiro, busco retraçar as condições de possibilidade, na atual conjuntura, que permitiram a retomada do termo/ação "remoção" como forma específica de intervenção estatal nas favelas cariocas. No segundo, analiso como operaram, concretamente, estas intervenções, a partir da observação dos inúmeros contatos entre agentes estatais e moradores daquelas localidades em processo de realocação. Por fim, trato das dinâmicas de ação coletiva constituídas a partir da crítica que estes moradores, bem como outros atores, individuais e coletivos, realizam a estes processos. / This thesis aims to analyze the meanings reviving of the practices and discourses on the "removal" of favelas in Rio de Janeiro today. To perform the research that resulted in this work followed several relocation situations conducted by the city. Analytically, this thesis is articulated from three levels: first, I seek to trace the emergency conditions and possibility in the current situation, the term / action "removal" as a specific form of state intervention in the slums. In the second, I analyze how operated, specifically, these interventions, from the observation of numerous contacts between state and inhabitants of the localities in the relocation process. Finally, treatment of the dynamics of collective action constituted from the criticism that these residents as well as other actors, individual and collective, perform these processes.

abstract: Employing an interdisciplinary approach with a grounding in new institutional economics, this dissertation investigates how institutions, as shared rules, norms, and strategies, mediate social-ecological outcomes in a system exposed to a novel threat in the form of a rapidly growing and especially destructive invasive plant, Mikania micrantha (Mikania). I explore whether and how communities (largely part of community forest user groups in the buffer zone of Chitwan National Park in Chitwan, Nepal) collectively act in the face of Mikania invasion. Collective action is vital to successful natural resource governance in a variety of contexts and systems globally. Understanding collective action and the role of institutions is especially important in the face of continued and amplifying global environmental changes impacting social-ecological systems, such as climate change and invasive species. Contributing to efforts to bolster knowledge of the role of collective action and institutions in social-ecological systems, this research first establishes that community forest governance and institutional arrangements are heterogeneous. I subsequently utilize content and institutional analyses to identify and address themes and norms related to Mikania management. The content analysis contributes an empirical study of the influence of trust in collective natural resource management efforts. Using two complementary econometric analyses of survey data from 1235 households, I additionally assess equity in access to community forest resources, an understudied area in the institutional literature, and the factors affecting collective action related to Mikania removal. Finally, an agent-based model of institutional change facilitates the comparison of two perspectives, rational choice and cultural diffusion, of how shared norms and strategies for Mikania management change over time, providing insight into institutional change generally. Results highlight the importance of trust and understanding the de facto, or on-the-ground institutions; the influence of perception on collective action; that integrating equity into institutional analyses may strengthen sustainable resource management efforts; and that rational choice is an unlikely mechanism of institutional change. The mixed-methods approach contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the role of institutions and collective action in invasive species management and broadly to the scientific understanding of the role of institutions in mediating global environmental changes. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Environmental Social Science 2016

abstract: This mixed-methods research study examined the level of collective action that is occurring among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in maternal and child health in Haiti. This study takes the view that health, and by extension, maternal and child health, is a global public good; global public goods are most efficiently provided by the means of collective action. Therefore, to the extent that maternal and child health services are provided efficiently in Haiti, collective action should be occurring. This study utilized a semi-structured interview approach to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. A total of 17 participants who were managers or executives of NGOs working in maternal and child health in Haiti were interviewed. The interviews also gathered quantitative data that characterized types of cooperation that were occurring among NGOs. The qualitative data that were collected in these interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis, and quantitative data were analyzed using social network analysis. The findings concluded that while there is cooperation occurring among NGOs in Haiti, the cooperation levels are low, networks are not very dense and there is overall general consensus that more cooperation is needed / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Global Health 2017

In order to understand the economic development process of a community had been a long time inspiring the researchers to seek elements that would base it. In this work is discussed how the social capital, known as one of the productive factors of a community help in individual and collective mobilization to achieve commons goals. The social capital characterize by trust and cooperative degree of a collectivity and how much it is presented in a community more favorable to join and civically to contribute with development actions and strategies benefiting all. The social capital as a collective factor is built by individual interests in cooperation among them and, this way, is susceptible to collective action dilemma and opportunism. This work analyzes the concept and the characteristics of social capital, its problems and the relation with local development. It was accomplished a case study at city Não-Me-Toque, based on northwest of the Rio Grande do Sul, to empirically check how the social capital is shown in local politicians and economics leaderships and what contributions have brought to the city development, since this city has a significative industrial park arised from entrepreneurship of its industrials, such as, keeping on agriculture technological vanguard that detach it on national and international scenarium. To elaborate this study was interviewed five politicians and economics people in the leading role from Não-Me-Toque, using as models references the Social Capital Integrate Questionnaire (SOCAP IQ) and Regional Development Hexagon to answer if the social capital will be as induced element of economic development, and the conclusion is that on the city studied this factor is effectively an important local competitive differencial. / Entender o processo de desenvolvimento econômico de uma comunidade vem há muito inspirando os estudiosos em busca de elementos que o embasariam. Nesse trabalho é discutido como o capital social, entendido também com um dos recursos de produção de uma comunidade que contribuiu na mobilização individual e coletiva para a realização de objetivos comuns. O capital social caracteriza-se pelo grau de confiança e de cooperação de uma coletividade e quanto mais presente numa comunidade mais propícia esta se encontra para unir-se e civicamente contribuir em ações e estratégias de desenvolvimento que beneficiam a todos. O capital social como um fator de coletividade é formado pelo interesse dos indivíduos em cooperarem entre si e, portanto, está suscetível ao dilema da ação coletiva e ao oportunismo. Nesse trabalho analisa-se o conceito e as características do capital social, os problemas que o acompanham e qual sua relação com o desenvolvimento local. Foi realizado um estudo de caso no município de Não-Me-Toque, situado na região noroeste do Rio Grande Sul, para se verificar empiricamente como o capital social se apresenta nas lideranças econômicas e políticas locais e que contribuições realiza para o desenvolvimento da cidade, uma vez que tem um representativo parque fabril surgido do empreendedorismo de seus empresários, assim como, se mantém na vanguarda tecnológica na produção agrícola que a destaca no cenário nacional e internacional. Para a elaboração desse estudo foram entrevistadas cinco lideranças econômicas e políticas de Não-Me-Toque, utilizando como referência os modelos do Questionário Integrado para Medir o Capital Social (QI-MCS) e o Hexágono do Desenvolvimento Regional para responder se o capital social constitui-se em um elemento influenciador do desenvolvimento econômico, tendo-se concluído que no município estudado esse fator contribui para o desenvolvimento local

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:24:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2005-06-08Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T20:31:14Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 santos_ab_me_prud.pdf: 8211731 bytes, checksum: ea82b1ece445cef2f07b5eff42829efa (MD5) / O processo de desenvolvimento de uma região é a resultante de um conjunto de fatores exógenos e endógenos que delimitam ou ampliam sua dinâmica, que podem condicionar sua capacidade de internalização dos excedentes gerados localmente. Além da participação relativa da região no planejamento e alocação de recursos econômicos e financeiros, públicos e privados, voltados principalmente para a infraestrutura, como também do nível de sua representação política junto aos centros de decisões macroeconômicas, nacionais e estaduais, torna-se necessária a existência de condições institucionais que facilitem a articulação, a participação e a organização social voltadas para os interesses coletivos. A participação social, por sua vez, é reflexo das condições históricas que moldam as instituições e determinam o grau e a qualidade do capital social existente nas comunidades. O objetivo maior do trabalho de pesquisa é o de demonstrar por que a microrregião de Presidente Prudente tem se ressentido de um baixo dinamismo sócio-econômico no contexto do estado de São Paulo nos últimos cinqüenta anos e, ainda, o de tentar aferir o estoque de capital social existente, por meio da análise de dois estudos de caso. A forma de ocupação territorial, os conflitos fundiários que se perpetuam, o patrimonialismo herdado do processo colonizador português, o poder político verticalizado, a ascensão da pecuária bovina como importante atividade econômica regional que desestabiliza o trabalho no campo, podem ter sido alguns dos fatores determinantes para a percepção de estagnação que caracteriza a microrregião. / The process of regional development is the result of both exogenous and endogenous factors, which can have positive or negative effects, conditioning the capacity of retaining the generated surpluses. Not only the region should take part in the planning and allocation of economical and financial resources, public or private, for infrastructure; it should posses a good political representation on the national and state macroeconomic decision centers; and also have institutional conditions that allow the articulation, the participation and the social organization for defending the community interests. Social participation, in turn, mirrors the historical conditions that have molded the institutions, and defines the degree and the quality of the social capital in the community. This work aims at explaining the low rates of economic and social development of the region of Presidente Prudente in the last fifty years, when compared with other regions of the São Paulo State; and also to assess the existing social capital stock by analyzing two cases. The territorial occupation, the unsolved land conflicts, the patrimonialism inherited from the Portuguese colonization, the verticalized political power, and the rise of an extensive livestock farming are key elements to explain the scarcity of social capital in the region of Presidente Prudente aswell as its impaired economic performance, making it stays among the poorest and less dynamic in São Paulo State.