Collective action in space: Assessing how cooperation and collective action vary across an African landscape

Abstract

This chapter focuses on individual adoption of a technology that produces a mixed public-private good. The technology is a formulation of insecticide that is applied to cattle as a "pouron". The mixed public-private good is control of external parasites and animal disease vectors. This chapter provides some background on the technical and economic aspects of the problem and the particular case study. It presents a model of household demand for pouron treatments. The model provides a mathematical definition of the three spatial dimensions of demand for the mixed public-private good. It discusses the methods used to collect, process, and analyse household-level census data and present the econometric results. The econometric results led to a subsequent qualitative study of local communities ability to cooperate in the use of the pourons. Both the methods and results of that phase of the research are described.