Community Aspirations and Collective Action

Christina Martini, Marcela Ibanez Diaz and Menusch Khadjavi

 We propose that community aspirations defined as the preferences for goals that increase communal well-being are essential for cooperation in collective action problems. This paper conceptualizes community aspirations and investigates whether the proposed measure is associated with cooperation. The second part of the paper presents the results of a randomized controlled trial aimed at lifting community aspirations by giving real-world examples of successful collective action. Survey and experimental data from rural Zambia indicate that individuals hold optimistic community aspirations compared with the current situation. We find some supporting evidence for a positive correlation between community aspirations and cooperation measured using experimental and survey data. Exposure to the examples of collaboration increases cooperation but harms community aspirations. Instead, we find that the mechanism could be through a change in the perceived norm of cooperation.