Farmers' cooperation to improve water quality under scientific uncertainty: A lab-in-the-field experiment

Cooperation amongst natural resource users is key tomanage ecosystems sustainably and achieve environmen-tal goals proposed by policy and regulations. This paperfocuses on the impact that livestock farming can haveon the quality of a water body and investigates farmers'willingness to cooperate to preserve water quality undertwo different sources of uncertainty and four differ-ent degrees of uncertainty. The first source relates to thelevel of water quality that must be guaranteed in a rivercatchment to avoid irreversible deterioration of aquaticecosystems (threshold uncertainty, i.e. with catastrophicconsequences). The second source relates to the financiallosses that farmers will experience in the long run if theyfail to cooperate (impact uncertainty). To this end, a lab-in-the-field experiment was conducted with livestock farmersof Northern Ireland. A local public good game with thresh-old uncertainty was framed around an agri-environmentalscheme designed to create ungrazed buffer zones for waterquality preservation. Results indicate that uncertaintygenerally hampers farmers' cooperation and the provisionof information geared to reduce uncertainty enhances it.Impact uncertainty has a milder negative impact on coop-eration than threshold uncertainty. Risk preferences andprobability weighting do not influence cooperation, whileloss aversion has an influence on cooperation.