In recent years decentralized development approaches have gained prominence in the agricultural sector. A host of community based watershed management projects have been implemented that encourage community organizations to undertake management of previously government controlled irrigation systems and forests. Community organizations have been given the responsibility of managing water distrib...

A new instanton solution is found in the quantum-mechanical double-well potential with a four-fermion term. The solution has finite action, S = −m3 3λ − ( mA 4 √ 2λ + g 261m 8960 ) ǫξiξjξkξl, where A is a bosonic collective coordinate, ξi, i = 1, ..., 4 are fermionic collective coordinates and g,m and λ are coupling constants. We explain why in general the instanton action can depend on collect...

Scholars in the field of sustainability have often argued that the purpose of establishing and maintaining interorganizational collaboration is to overcome internal limitations of organizations and to strengthen organizational capacity. To examine structural effects of inter-organizational collaboration regarding the ability of networked organizations to effectively manage disasters, this study...

Leadership has often been proposed as a tool to aid in problems of collective action and social interaction. This is further supported by the presence of strong leaders in various social movements throughout history. In this paper, I represent social interaction with an n-person prisoner’s dilemma, where monitoring is imperfect monitoring and there is some form of communication available. I wil...

Recent research has hypothesized that empowerment can arise from collective action through collective self-objectification (CSO), defined as action that actualizes participants' social identity against the power of dominant groups. Activists (N = 37) described several experiences that made them feel empowered (and disempowered). Among the various explanations they offered for these feelings, th...

Collective behaviors often spread via the self-reinforcing dynamics of critical mass. In collective behaviors with strongly self-reinforcing dynamics, incentives to participate increase with the number of participants, such that incentives are highest when the full population has adopted the behavior. By contrast, when collective behaviors have weakly self-reinforcing dynamics, incentives to pa...

Past research on the effects of boundary permeability and tokenism (open boundaries with restricted access) suggests that when options for individual mobility exist, members of low status groups tend to exit their group and attempt to enter higher status groups. We hypothesized that the effects of boundary permeability on preferences for individual vs. collective action would depend upon prior ...

a r t i c l e i n f o The decentralization of resource property rights has become an increasingly popular policy in many natural resource-dependent communities of the developing world. However, the success of this policy approach depends on both collective action and institutionalization. It is therefore important to evaluate collective action and insti-tutionalization where the process of prop...

The spontaneous fission lifetimes have been studied microscopically by minimizing the collective action integral in a two-dimensional collective space of quadrupole moments (Q20, Q22) representing elongation and triaxiality. The microscopic collective potential and inertia tensor are obtained by solving the self-consistent HartreeFock-Bogoliubov (HFB) equations with the Skyrme energy density fu...

The article sets out the value of theorizing collective action from a social science perspective that engages with the messy actuality of practice. It argues that community health psychology relies on an abstract version of Paulo Freire's earlier writing, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which provides scholar-activists with a 'map' approach to collective action. The article revisits Freire's lat...