Farmers’ Cooperation to Improve Water Quality Under Scientific Uncertainty : A Lab-in-The-Field Experiment

Cooperation amongst natural resource users is key to sustainably managing ecosystems. This paper focuses on the impact that livestock farming can have on the quality of a water body and investigates farmers’ willingness to cooperate to maintain a given quality level under two different sources of uncertainty and four different degrees of uncertainty. The first source relates to the level of water quality that must be guaranteed in a river catchment to avoid irreversible deterioration of aquatic ecosystems (threshold uncertainty). The second source relates to the financial losses/penalties that farmers will experience in the long run if they fail to cooperate and minimize water pollution (impact uncertainty). A lab-in-the-field experiment was conducted with farmers in Northern Ireland. A public good game with threshold uncertainty was framed around an agri-environmental scheme (AES) designed to create ungrazed buffer zones for water quality preservation. Results indicate that the AES scheme fails to promote the level of cooperation required to avoid irreversible deterioration of water quality regardless of the type and degree of uncertainty. However, reductions in impact uncertainty increase farmers cooperation more than reductions in threshold uncertainty. Risk preferences and probability weighting do not influence cooperation, while loss aversion does