Collective Action

Theory
Amelia Rahmah Safira
071711133025
Collective
Action
Any form of organized social or
political act carried about by a
group of people in order to address
their needs.
Collective Dilemma
● Collective action dilemmas (hereafter collective dilemmas) occur when the joint decisions
of two or more individuals result in socially undesirable outcomes

● Solving collective dilemmas requires changing individual decisions through governance

arrangements that alter individual payoffs and result in a joint outcome that leaves at least
one individual better off without harming any other individuals

● Collective dilemmas are at the heart of most real-world governance challenges, including
environmental, health, education, foreign aid, and other policy domains.

● From the collective action perspective, then, governance attempts to solve these different
types of dilemmas by creating institutional arrangements that redefine the payoffs from
individual behavior and incentivize cooperation through top-down mandates or encourage
bottom-up self-organizing

● Governance is a multi-level process that creates monitoring mechanisms, punishes

defection, rewards cooperation, provides information, fosters trust-based reciprocity, and
otherwise attempts to create the conditions that make collective action likely to occur
(Ostrom, E. 2005).

(Ansell & Torfing 2016: 21)

 Two Collective Problems that
Commonly Affect Public Policy

The efficient
production Common pool
and effective resources
management
of public good

(Ansell & Torfing 2016: 21-22)

Classical Theories of Collective
Action and Governance
• Hobbes believed that people act
Thomas Hobbes purely out of self-interest, writing in
Leviathan in 1651 that "if any two
men desire the same thing, which
nevertheless they cannot both enjoy,
they become enemies.“

• Hobbes believed that the state of

nature consists of a perpetual war
between people with conflicting
interests, causing people to quarrel
and seek personal power even in
situations where cooperation would
be mutually beneficial for both
parties.

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:23)

 David Hume
• David Hume provided another
early and better-known
interpretation of what is now called
the collective action problem in his
1738 book , A Treatise of Nature.
21,8%
•35,5%
In a situation in which a thousand
people are expected to work
together to achieve a common
goal, individuals will be likely to
free ride, as they assume that
each of the other members of the
team will put in enough effort to
10,9%
achieve said goal. In smaller
groups, the impact one individual
has is much greater, so individuals
will be less inclined to free ride

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:23)

 Mancur Oslon

• The most prominent modern

interpretation of the collective
action problem can be found in
21,8%
Mancur Oslon’s 1965 book The
35,5%of Collective Action
Logic

•  In it, he addressed the accepted

belief at the time by sociologists
and political scientists that groups
were
10,9%necessary to further the
interests of their members.

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:24)

 NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIC MODELS OF
PUBLIC GOODS AND COMMON POOL
RESOURCES

Public Goods
Things that are available for the use of everyone,
regardless of those people's investment. 
Free Riding
The use of public goods by people uninvolved in the process of
making them available.

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:24-25)

 NEW INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS
AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
COLLECTIVE ACTION
• A substantial challenge in formulating effective governance is the
ubiquity of transaction costs that actors face (Coase 1960).

• Transaction costs are the costs associated with designing

institutions, bargaining over the distribution of resources, monitoring
their individual behavior, and enforcing penalties for defection
(North 1990). Additionally, transaction costs can take the form of
organizational or administrative costs associated with top-down
implementation of policy (Williamson 1999).

• The extent to which the provision of a collective good is more

efficient via a top-down or bottom-up governance arrangement is a
function of the relative transaction costs associated with each.

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:25-26)

 THE PROVISION OF COLLECTIVE
GOODS IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS

• Collective goods are provided in complex political-economic

systems.
• In self-organized systems of collective good provision, actors
create new institutional frameworks within existing higher-level
institutional frameworks (Ostrom, E. 2005).
• A core dilemma in the provision of collective goods by governments
concerns whether political incentives will result in efficient or in sub-
optimal levels of the collective goods demanded by citizens.
• Tiebout (1956) first introduced the concept of competition among
multiple governments in the provision of collective goods, arguing
that citizens will “vote with their feet” to live in the jurisdiction with
the most collective goods provisioning relative to the tax rate.

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:26-27)

 Classification of Goods
V. Ostrom dan Ostrom (1977)

Quasi Public
Goods
Pure Private Example : Private
Goods Scholarship, parking
Example : Food, clothes, space, books in the library,
house, dll etc

Quasi Private Pure Public

Goods Goods
Example : Toll road Example : national
service, electric power, defence, information,
private insurance, etc lighting, etc

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:27-28)

 CONCLUSION

From classical The future study of

political There are no collective dilemmas
philosophy to panacea is an exciting field
modern governance of inquiry. Scholars
experiments have produced an
and field work, arrangements impressive body of
the study of that work at all research into
collective times in all collective dilemmas
action has places. over the past
occupied a century, but there
central place in remains a great deal
scholarly of potential to
inquiry. further our
understanding of
these situations.

(Ansell & Torfing 2016:29)

THANKS!