CONDICIONES GENERALES PARA LA PRESTACION DEL SERVICIO
CONDICIONES GENERALES PARA LA PRESTACION DEL SERVICIO DE DISTRIBUCION DE GAS NATURAL EN LA ZONA GEOGRAFICA DE
IV. Industrial de Alta Presión
5. Acceso a los Servicios
In the literature, factors constraining tropical reservoir productivity are usually related to morphometric (area, depth, shoreline), edaphic (nutrients loading) and/or climatic (e.g. flushing rate, water level fluctuation) conditions. A rich body of literature is available that proposes to link existing reservoir productivity to a wide range of environmental factors.
Very little has been proposed on the other hand to include socio-institutional considerations into those discussions, despite the significant literature that emphasizes the importance of collective actions and social and/or economic factors in explaining activities related to the exploitation of natural resources and common pool resources (e.g. Ostrom 1990).
The research presented above was a first attempt to address this flaw. Using the IGB data-base created in the early stages of the project, we explored some new directions regarding the potential factors influencing the productivity of the IGB reservoirs. The investigations were obviously limited by the nature and quality of the information, but interesting conclusions were nevertheless achieved. Some of those results, not only confirm the crucial role that socio-institutional factors seems to play in shaping the system productivity –something one should not be surprised to observe-, but also suggest –perhaps more unexpectedly- that arrangements supporting private ownership may not necessarily lead to better or more efficient outcomes when compared to collective arrangements.
Let us first recall that our results are in line with the more conventional work focusing on the role of bio-physical factors. Our first model confirms in particular that the productivity of the IGB reservoirs is influence by the size and depth of the reservoirs, two of the factors that are usually recognized to have a strong influence on reservoir productivity. The absence of correlation with any of the variables reflecting the stocking process (stock density or stocking quantity) is more disappointing. This suggests a poor efficiency in the mastering of the stocking techniques for the group of reservoirs included in the data-base.
Page | 69
Secondly, the positive correlation between productivity and effort is worth noticing but more complex to account for. As ‘effort’ is a variable resulting from the number of fishers operating in the reservoir considered combined with the number of fishing days per year (see Table 2.1), one potential explanation is that this effort variable is actually driven by productivity. The higher the ‘natural’ productivity of the reservoir, the larger the number of fishers which the reservoir can sustain.In a second part of the analysis, we investigated the potential role of what we termed socio- institutional factors. Those included the period and price of the leasing arrangement, the identity of the leasee who obtained the temporary management rights (the lease) over the reservoir and the identity of the fishers who were subcontracted by the leasee to fish the reservoir on his behalf.
In the literature, the absence of individual property right and market mechanisms in the production, distribution and consumption of public goods is usually thought to render these goods susceptible to under-supply and over-consumption (Sargeson, 2002). In particular neoclassical economists argue that private ownership provides the necessary incentive for actors to invest and develop their activity. Johnson (1972) for instance explains that, for a rational individual to be able to maximize his rewards and minimize his costs for exploiting a resource, costs and rewards should be internalized. According to his theory, private individual property only allows this and provides incentives to ensure that marginal benefits are being maximized. In our case this view means that leasing arrangements under a private contractor are expected to be characterized by higher investment (e.g. in terms of stocking density), better management and therefore higher outputs (productivity).
Alternative approaches however have been developed which challenge the neoclassical theory. A few authors in this arena deny the validity of the basic collective action and CPR management problems outlined by the neoclassical writers. Rather, they suggest that other behavioral considerations condition and work within the individual benefit versus collective good decision structure and suggest mechanisms through which these considerations exert communication and facilitate the learning and convergence of interests that make cooperation more likely (Morrow 1994, Seabright 1993, Runge 1984). They argue that in the CPR context of mutual resource reliance, the dominant individual incentive is neither free-riding nor refusal to cooperate, but rather coordination (Runge 1984, 1992).
Despite these arguments in favor of local collective management, there is still a strong belief, specially among western society, that such collective arrangements are inherently unstable, subject to inevitable pressure from free riders and are bound to be degraded into `tragedy of commons’ situation. In our case this means that arrangement 1-1 corresponding to a situation where both investment and management related to the reservoir stocking and fishing are made by a cooperative are expected to be less effective than other arrangements involving private contractors.
Our results challenge those assumptions. While arrangements 1-1 appear indeed to be characterized by lower productivity than the other arrangements, the analysis shows that this lower productivity is mainly related to the mean depth of the reservoirs, which in those cases is statistically larger than for the other reservoirs managed under other types of contract. In order terms, the low productivity characterizing the arrangement 1-1 is not due to a lack of efficiency or investment (in particular in terms of stock quantity) but to some bio-physical characteristics of the reservoirs.
The second result that challenged the conventional wisdom is the fact that although the arrangements 3-2 appears to be characterized by higher stock density than the others –and in particular than the 1-1 arrangement-, a feature than some would quickly interpret as the evidence of the superiority of the private ownership over collective one in terms of investment, the data reveal that this higher density under 3-2 result instead from the fact that the reservoirs operated under 3-2 (but also 3-3 and 2-3) are particularly small. When one analyzes the stock quantity – which reflects more appropriately the actual level of investment- one observes that the arrangement 3-2 is actually characterized by a lower stock quantity than all the other
arrangements -and in particular the arrangements 1-1. In other words, the view that cooperatives are likely to invest less than private contractors is not confirmed by our data.
What those different results show is that private entrepreneurs target specifically small, shallow reservoirs as they know that those are naturally particularly productive, while they deliberately disregard larger, deeper reservoirs. In those conditions, these larger reservoirs are more likely to remain under the management of cooperatives, which is what we observed here. On the other hand, these cooperatives can not compete with the private contractors for smaller (but more productive) reservoirs.
In sum what is often interpreted as a better capacity of private contractors to invest and manage reservoirs is in fact the result of their higher financial capacity to win the leasing bids of the small- shallow reservoirs. The cooperatives and the independent groups of fishers, characterized by less cash facility are then left with the remaining larger (and less productive) reservoirs.