How Do Local Community Members Accept the Usage of Commons By Nonlocals in the Under-Used Commons? : An Approach Based on Agent-Based Simulation

Many Japanese common forests are underutilized due to the increase in imported wood. Furthermore, depopulation in mountainous areas has accelerated the underutilization of common forests. Thus, users of common forests need to accept nonlocals who pay usage fee to access common resources. Hayashi et al. (2013) compared the usage rules of commons for nonlocals in 10 common forests at Tadami Town, Fukushima prefecture of Japan. They found that communities could be classified by two types according to how they dealt with nonlocals. The first one has institutions to accommodate nonlocals’ entrance, and the second one has institutions to exclude nonlocals’ entry. Why do some communities actively accept nonlocals, and some communities exclude nonlocals? Most previous studies do not consider the situation of under-use of commons.

  This study examines the effect of usage rule of commons on welfare of local community members in under-use situation, using an agent-based simulation. Here, I consider three types of rules; (a) <Accommodate I>, which has entrance fee system by voluntary monitoring staff and the entrance fee share local community members evenly, (b) <Accommodate II>, which has entrance fee system but entrance fee is distributed among monitoring staff, (c) <Exclusion>, which exclude nonlocals by voluntary monitoring staff. The simulation shows that the difficulty of monitoring nonlocals determines the benefit of usage rule for local community members. First, <Accommodate II> operate in favor of local community members’ payoff when it is difficult for local community members to monitor nonlocals. Second, <Accommodate I> is more efficient than<Accommodate II> as the difficulty of monitoring is removed. Third, <Exclusion> works well when it is easy to monitor nonlocals.