Local rulemaking, enforcement and compliance in state-owned forest commons Graham Epstein The Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, 513 North Park Ave., Bloomington, IN 47408, USA Environmental Change and Governance Group, School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada abstract article info Article history: Received 6 January 2016 Received in revised form 9 September 2016 Accepted 12 September 2016 Available online xxxx The literature on rule compliance is divided between those urging greater autonomy for stakeholders in rulemaking processes; and those arguing for increased enforcement. However recent experimental evidence highlights the potential for synergies between participatory rulemaking and enforcement. This paper therefore seeks to build upon these findings to explore the relationship between local rulemaking, local monitoring and compliance in field settings. The results which draw upon data about the behavior of 93 fuelwood user groups in state-owned forest commons in Asia, Africa and Latin America suggest that the average group is more likely to comply with rules when local rulemaking is combined with local monitoring. However, in some contexts it ap- pears that local rulemaking in particular and other institutional arrangements in general may yield similar results. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Rule compliance Forest commons Intrinsic motivation Participation Monitoring Enforcement 1. Introduction Rule compliance is an important, if not essential, condition for the sus- tainable governance of social-ecological systems (SESs) (Young, 1979; Zaelke et al., 2005). Indeed illegal harvesting of natural resources is often identified as a leading cause of environmental degradation (Contreras-Hermosilla, 2002; World Bank, 2004; Fromentin and Powers, 2005; Agnew et al., 2009); and thus a better understanding of the ways in which policies might be designed to encourage compliance is needed to confront the mounting environmental problems that human societies face. Fortunately by synthesizing empirical studies of rule compliance (Kuperan and Sutinen, 1999; Nielsen, 2003; Ramcilovic-Suominen and Epstein, 2012) and common-pool resource (CPR) management (Ostrom, 1990; Cox et al., 2010) scholars have identified a number of in- stitutional conditions that appear to contribute to compliance and cooper- ation. Most notably a number of studies suggest that prospects for compliance and cooperation tend to increase when stakeholders are (i) able to participate in rulemaking processes to influence the content of rules that affect them; and (ii) organize monitoring and sanctioning in order to enforce those rules. However, important debates remain with regards to the relative priority of these factors and the ways in which they might interact to influence behavior. While some have argued for the primacy, if not sufficiency of enforcement as a strategy to generate incentives for actors to follow rules (Becker, 1968; Hardin, 1968); others have suggested that participatory processes can lead to the expression of intrinsic motivation to follow rules only to be negated by external interventions such as enforcement (Frey, 1997; Ryan and Deci, 2000; Bowles, 2008). A recent experimental study however contradicted predictions re- garding the superiority of either participatory rulemaking or enforcement by using a factorial design to highlight the synergistic effects of the two approaches (DeCaro et al., 2015). Indeed, groups subject to a combined voting and enforcement treatment exhibited lower rates of resource de- pletion, higher average individual returns and higher levels of compliance than groups who were subject to voting or enforcement alone. Therefore this study seeks to build upon these findings by considering the relation- ship between local rulemaking, local monitoring and compliance in the context of fuelwood appropriation in state-owned forest commons using data collected as part of the International Forestry Resources and In- stitutions (IFRI) program (Wertime et al., 2007). The results suggest that user groups are most likely to exhibit high levels of compliance with rules for fuelwood appropriation when local rulemaking is combined with local monitoring, while controlling for a number of potentially intervening fac- tors; providing support for the findings presented in DeCaro et al. (2015). The remainder of this chapter is structured in the following way. Section 1.1 briefly outlines the concept of compliance and the develop- ment of compliance theory from its origins in economics, to the more socialized and political models of the present day. It then continues by emphasizing the potential role of local rulemaking and local monitor- ing; before turning to the question of when local rulemaking might con- tribute to compliance. Section 2 presents the approach taken in this paper, and the results are reported in Section 3. Finally, Sections 4 and 5 conclude this paper by discussing the limitations of this research and implications for compliance theory. Ecological Economics 131 (2017) 312–321 E-mail address: graham.epstein@uwaterloo.ca. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.09.012 0921-8009/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon