Thursday, January 15, 2009

Is Popkin again proved right???

Regarding today's class, the failure of Bulgaria's collective irrigation programme is a failure of another collective action.
Did not it lay out well defined rules for CPR which is necessary according to Ostrom Institutional theory??...Ostrom opined that self-governance and self-organization are the two main components for any collective group action. But the irrigation system of Bulgaria had all these things, but still it failed to attain its objectives. It is said that it was due to power dynamics, assymetric power distribution and as a result of which people who held the power defined  the formal rules according to their own to reap maximum benefit out of it.
Is not it we are again saying that it is all about self-interest which drives people, which Popkin described in defining peasantry using political approach. Whereever the collective action is happening it is also because of self-interest which sometimes becomes rational.
So ultimately everybody is carried by self-interest........Is not it?? Don't you think that Samuel Popkin was very much pragmatic???

1 comment:

Sudhir said...

self-interest has always been one of the motivating factors behind collective action. it is only at the highest level of co-operation that humans tend to think only for others. this was identified even by the other scholars like E S Bogardus in his book "Fundamentals of Social Psychology". In the debate between Scott and Popkin, even Scott was of the opinion that village-wide survival strategies are mainly driven by individual survival needs.