2025 Distinguished Lecture in Anthropology by Dr. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

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We'll get started. So, thanks everyone for coming for this year's anthropology distinguished lecture. We're very happy to welcome Dr. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder.

And I guess I've known Monique for around 20 years now. And to really do justice to the impact she's had on anthropology and specifically the the branch of evolutionary anthropology called human behavioral ecology. You know to really do justice to that would require a lecture about rather than by our distinguished lecture which I'm

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prepared to do. However, she has instructed me to keep this short and I'm going to try to do my best to respect that mostly. So, Monique was originally trained as a cultural anthropologist and if I remember how she tells it, traveling around the Sahara and seeing the diversity of ways that different people live their lives in different ecologies and in the same ecology really drove her to ask some questions that traditional anthropology at that time really didn't give good

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satisfying answers to. And so for instance, why do women in some societies marry polygenously? From a woman's perspective, is it is it ever beneficial to your reproduction, to your well-being, to your child's well-being to agree to be a co-wife and in what situations? So these kinds of questions motivated her her really pioneering work on reproductive decision-making and life history you know among for instance the Kipsigis in Kenya the Pimbwe in Tanzania and several other East African groups.

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Now this early work you know really bringing an ethnographer sensitivity to you know really deep engagement with evolutionary theory economic theory paved the way to even more pioneering work on for instance uh reproductive skew baitman's principle uh cultural phlogenetics, macroevolution, inequality and the transmission of wealth across generations. Now while all this was going on at the same time Monique was applying theory from cultural evolution and behavioral ecology to other problems of

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importance to the people in East Africa that she worked with. So for instance, how and why do some local communities develop governance institutions that both promote sustainability and improve people's lives while other nearby communities really struggle to do that. And you know these these questions, they're important, but they're not just side a side project. You know, really conservation has been at the core of Monique's work for decades, and I believe she's going to be talking more

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about that today. Her commitment to conservation and really her ingenuity in working together to find culturally appropriate sustainably sustainability solutions to improve people's lives I think is is really well illustrated by an NGO she founded in in western Tanzania 15 years ago now I guess now the original goal of this NGO if I understand it is to engage with this really complex interaction that communities have with lions and it does me much more things than that now. And importantly, you

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know, it's now self-supporting, right? And in terms of both its science and its fundraising, and doesn't need any more guidance from non-Tanzanes, including from Monique. So, it's really standing on its own two legs. And that's really a great accomplishment. So this was just sort of a brief overview of of some of the work that Monique's been doing and I think it makes it clear why she's been recognized as for instance distinguished research professor emerita after a long career at the

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University of California Davis. She's been inducted into the national academy of sciences in both the anthropology and the human environmental sciences sections. And in recent years she's been recruited as senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig in Germany, as external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complex systems and as an honorary research fellow at the University of Bristol in the UK which is where she's coming from

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now. So her research has been funded by lots of grants from NSF in the US, ESRC in the UK. She's presented her work in the form of several books, lots of articles including some fancy journals like science nature PNAS, and importantly she's mentored a whole generation of students who really continue her style of rigorous science with responsiveness and sensitivity to the communities that people engage with. So now let's give a big welcome to Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

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who'll be talking about applying cultural evolution to sustainability challenges, an example from Pemba Island Zanzibar. So thanks Monique.

Thanks, John, very much. An awful lot to live up to, which I'm sure I won't, but first of all, thank you so much for inviting me here, and it's just great to see some old friends. And also, I know there's lots of I've been hearing from John about lots of people working here who I just really hope I get a chance to meet and talk to in

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the party afterwards, which I'm sure we're all looking forward to. So my talk today is actually I'm going to tell a story and it's a story of an anthropologist applying or using evolutionary theory to tackle questions, real contemporary questions but how to sort of avoid or or at least deal with the slings and arrows of circumstance and politics. So the kind of overall message is that the outside even if you're a rigorous anthropologist or doing rigorous science, the outside

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world is messy. It's not a nice controlled lab. And how do you navigate your science through that kind of lens? And I'm going to take you on this cold December afternoon to a lovely island in the western Indian Ocean, the island of Pemba, which is part of the archipelago of Zanzibar within the nation of Tanzania. And you can see a picture here of people um preparing for a DAO racing festival on a beach, Vumawimbi Beach that I'm actually going to come back to at the very end of the

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talk with a very sad story. So we'll come back to this beach. Um sorry, it's not going forward. My computer is not going forward. Is there a remote? We didn't test this, did we? Um I'm doing the down button and the forward button and nothing's happening. It's kind of weird. >> Okay. Or maybe if I put it onto Oh, I know. And we um maybe if I press that. Yeah, I can do the button here. I guess bit tricky but I'll try. It would be nice if if there was a clicker. Okay. So the talk

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is situated within the overall picture of climate change. Um the really the social science underlying the challenge of understanding why we as a species are destroying our home, our only planet. And this is a story that's very personal to me because this is my house burning. Is it going? Yeah, it is burning for the second time in the hills above Davis, California where we lived. And so this whole question of how to understand or this sort of the importance of the need for change in

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institutions both local, national and international institutions to try to uh control our behavior and to stop the damage um that we're doing to our planet. that has real salience for me because of these personal experiences. The sort of institutional nudge that I want to um introduce that I want to introduce you here to is something called payments for ecological environmental services. Uh these are known as PEZ and they're effectively uh payments that are made to incentivize good or pro- environmental behavior.

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sort of conservation behavior. The payments come um often either from private sources uh the the users of the services or from public or state sources. And the payments are of course contingent on compliance so that the behavior is environmentally friendly. And um for those of you who've not heard of PES before, a sort of simple way of thinking of a good example of this is uh the people in the valley uh basically will pay the communities or the land owners uh higher up on the waterershed to not cut down their trees so that

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their water source remains clean and non uh nonsilted uh to avoid siltation. So that's that's a kind of an example of this payment for environmental services. The specific um PEZ I'm going to talk about is something called uh reduced emissions from deforesta from deforestation and forest degradation known as red plus and this is a global initiative uh to reduce greenhouse gases uh that that result from deforestation. It's a program that's mainly u directed at countries in the developing world

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under different UN agencies and effectively it provides finan financial incentives for slowing down deforestation and as with any of these kinds of instruments uh it has specific requirements. Uh one is that the uh reduction in deforestation must be demonstrable. Uh so that means uh typically that you know satellite imagery analysis must be done to show uh that the rate of deforestation has has has slowed which can of course be quite complex for the kinds of communities I'm going to be talking about. But often

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these programs are done together with partners who help uh train or provide those technical skills. A second requirement uh is that these programs uh demonstrate additionality. That's a technical term within the red literature, but it means that uh the community um must be able to show that they've reduced their rate of deforestation more than they would have had they not been in the red plus program. And as probably many of you as scientists know, demonstrating uh counterfactuals or using

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counterfactuals, coming up with convincing counterfactuals uh can be pretty difficult. And then uh finally these program the these programs require that the payments are made to appropriate beneficiaries. And again uh any of you who've been involved in in designing programs uh maybe to um uh for compensation or remuneration or or uh some way of of well remunerating communities uh can be re reparation things like that can be really difficult to design in such a way uh that they're not vulnerable to

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cheating or to elite capture um or to gaming of the system. So once you get to the details of RED uh it's quite complicated to actually make these programs work. Accordingly uh some people are super excited about RED uh referring to it to as a program as a triple win uh to basically uh reduce climate change uh to uh avoid loss biodiversity and to eradicate poverty. But there's another strain of thought which very much comes from the sort of neoliberal critique of western conservation programs uh which claims

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that it's a better better dead than red. And you'll I'm not going to come down on either side of this debate here but you'll see that many of these uh sort of strands of both of these positions uh will come up in the story I'm going to tell. So the story starts um on uh Pembbe Island. we were actually working. Uh, is there a pointer if Oh, well. Oh, yeah. Maybe. Is that working? It's working on my screen, but not on yours, right? Oh, well, it doesn't matter. Um, we were working um

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in on the western side of Tanzania on the lake tanka. Um, but we decided to go for a holiday uh on Pembbear and uh all good science starts on holidays. say scientists should definitely take holidays. It's the lesson I take from this. So anyhow, you can see uh Pembbe the northern island in the um archipelago of Zanzibar. The southern island is the one that uh typically is referred to as Zanzibar and is sort of where all of the tourists go. And as I said before, this is part of the uh uh nation of Tanzania. So here we are in

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our local Starbucks. Uh, I'm there with my husband and I start hearing people talking about being paid for hot air and I'm kind of surprised what's going on. But looking into it a little bit more, I find out that there is a red plus uh going on on the island and that uh 18 Shah Shah awards. I'm going to use that term a lot. 18 Shahier are enrolled in this red plus program. They're sort of in the red readiness phase. And as I find out more about it, I find the program started in 2010, was ending

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in 215. It was funded by the Norwegians and uh care. And the the goal was to support communities with um sustainably managing their forests so that they would be able to be paid um in in uh for the carbon that they were protecting sort of uh proportional to the extent to which they had avoided deforestation. So here um was a red project that we kind of stumbled upon. I was very excited about it. You'll see why in a moment. Um but I uh when I got back to Davis, I wrote a grant uh to try to see

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how I could um study the sort of roll out of this program and and use it to explore ideas in evolutionary anthropology. I called it conservation, cooperation, and carbon credits. Piloting plans for peer. I was incredibly proud of the alliteration. So this takes you, this slide takes you a little bit into the theory and the kind of logic behind why I got excited about what I was doing. I think about stinting. So stinting is deciding not to cut down a tree that you would have cut down otherwise. So think about stinting

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as a pro- environmental or conservation act. Uh which has two um aspects. Uh first of all, it's cooperative. It's cooperative with others in your village because we're deciding uh sort of collectively to not cut down trees to uh be able to sustainably manage our forests and hopefully uh get carbon credits. It's cooperative with uh the global community in that it's a contribution to slowing uh um greenhouse gases which are of course behind global climate change and it's also cooperation

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of course with the unborn who are going to inherit this uh planet that we leave for them. It's also costly to the individual um in that he or she has to limit their consumption. You decide not to use that tree for something and it's costly in terms of um you have to police the behavior of others. And here um I just want to illustrate that with this picture on the left um that these guys are going out to go and um do a a patrol in the mangro forest. People normally do this at night. Um it's dangerous. Partly

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the the the spikes that mangrove come up on uh comes up with the the the shoots that come up um are really really sharp and they absolutely tear your feet to pieces. That's why they're complaining here. Bilaboots without boots uh you you really get hurt. But it's also costly in terms of time. Uh many pemb fishermen like to fish at night and so uh they lose fishing time. And it's also costly in terms of confronting. You might confront people from another village and there may be violence. And even if you

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confront people from your own village, you're going to lose social capital for maybe taking your friend or maybe even a relative uh reporting them to the village authorities. So as we know as uh evolutionary anthropologists, selfish behavior typically out competes cooperative behavior. uh you can see just a very simple individual selection model there that over time more selfish individuals uh accumulate over time and so there's this question are there situations under which cooperative or selfless behavior

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can come to predominate and that's the kind of cooperative behavior that we would need uh to manage these forests and right so there is the situation right can there be a situation where cooperative conservationists are favored And the answer is yes. If you think in terms of group selection, so those of you who are biologists who uh think about the price equation, we think in terms of the relative strength of uh selection within groups and between groups. And in situations where the selection is stronger between groups

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than within groups, groups that have a large number of cooperators, so the groups there with the number of with more paler circles do over time replace or predominate over the groups with more selfish individuals. And of course you following the price equation, this depends on the balance of individual and group level selection. So the conceit of my proposal and it is a conceit and there's lots more to dig into here but just at the simple level is that if red plus is paying communities for carbon

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conservation traits and these cooperative traits will spread across pea and this is something that um a fellow grad student of ours from or you from Davis uh Tim Wearing called a cultural multi-level selection cascade this spread cooperation uh across groups or cooperating cooperative groups replacing less cooperative groups. And of course, you're going to be asking spread how um and there's lots of different mechanisms. I'm just going to start with a really simple uh case here. It's very intuitive that u communities

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that would that get paid for their carbon uh could use that money maybe to build a dispensary or a new classroom um or well typically a mosque is really important. Pembans are Muslims. They pray five times a day. You can see the fishermen um who kind of got caught short had to um pray out on the beach while we were collecting crabs. I also worked with my husband on crab work there. Um, but most of the village uh mosques uh look pretty much just like this uh grass mosque in one village here. But with money they might be able

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to build something really fancy like go like what's going up in the bottom picture. And so if you're in a community and maybe your neighbors have built a new mosque and uh they got that money from uh trading carbon, it's going to be an incentive uh for you to think well maybe this is something that we should do too. we should try to control our deforestation and try to get access to these carbon funds. So this so and just to sort of clarify that the uh selection here it's economic incentives not um

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differential reproductive success or differential fitness uh that that operates as the selection uh force on cultural traits. So this is an economic model but the logic that we take from evolutionary biology is effectively the same. So the uh coming back to pea uh pea has been known for the last millennium as alazira aladra which means the green is absolutely a spectacular place amazing forests and of course the communities with these wonderful forests are what's typically called in the anthropological

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literature forest dependent communities. uh depending on on timber and non-timber products for cooking, building, building boats and houses. Then uh the forest provide food and medicine, fruits, all kinds of different things. Uh so at the bottom you can see some kids uh cooking a bird that they've trapped. Um at the top you can see a woman who's been collecting shellfish um in the mangroves and now that the tide's coming back in, she's carrying a bundle of mangroves back home um for uh firewood. But these

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forests are under heavy threat from uh cultivation and grazing by the local community themselves. Also population growth. The the um mean uh mean completed family size at the moment in in rural Pembber is still 6.2 kids. Uh so massively growing population on a tiny island and outside pressure from mainland Tanzania from the big tourist um companies on the the southern island of Zanzibar. Um and uh so and also from the police and army uh who were stationed on on Peppa they heavy pressure on these villages these chahers

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uh community forests. So uh just for some descriptive data here uh we show that um up to well 31% of total um of a household's total income comes from forest products. And you can see on the left graphs a graph that not surprisingly uh wealthier households take more from the forests than poorer households. It's partly because they have more needs because they're bigger. Um they have more labor. They also tend to have more capital. Well, they do have more capital because they're wealthier. Um but if you see on

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the right hand graph, the typical thing you might expect is that poorer households a higher proportion of their income comes from the forests than richer households. So any of these kinds of projects we're talking about, you have to always think very carefully about the poor people who are the poorest households who are most dependent on the forest. So I got the grant. They like the alliteration and in uh the next year we uh got back to Pembber and we were almost immediately invited to the celebration at the end of the project.

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Remember the project was 2010 to 2015. We were invited to the celebration of red plus readiness. So these 18 communities had gone through uh their their redclass readiness and they were ready to start trading um they're ready to start trading carbon. They were they had they were receiving here that what are called the community forest management agreements Kofmmers and under these agreements they get security of access to their their forests um for sustainably managing the forest to sell carbon to trade carbon and this involves

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uh getting sort of uh building institutions in the village which are often institutions built on top of pre-existing um traditional instit institutions. But so when I say institutions, think uh committees to kind of manage what's going on. Think rules, regulations, how much we as a community are going to allow ourselves to harvest. What are the what are the limits to what we can harvest? Um allow each other to harvest. And also uh procedures, how to mount those patrols you saw a picture of or how what to deal

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with infra how to deal with infractions, what you do when people break the rules. And um oh yeah sorry I'm gone one ahead there. Um they also had received um what were called motivation payments and that was to help them to develop uh procedures for how to deal with this cash that was going to come in. Uh so they got kind of practice payments and they worked out you know how they're going to decide whether they put it into a a mosque or a hospital or a madrasa or or a classroom or restoring the road or

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whatever. And then they also had some alternative um livelihood projects. Things like keeping um uh beekeeping to for honey um nurseries and other small-cale enterprises that were kind of forest friendly. The these are typically known as co- benefits in the red plus literature. And so I was super excited. I was back here now to study my CMLS cascade which I really thought of as studying the evolution of cooperation in real time. That's something that you know we're obviously a unique species with respect

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to the degree of cooperation that we have but we just end up always modeling it or sort of making telling just those stories but here I had an opportunity to study how cooperation might spread across the island and I was really excited and had managed to raise money for that. So um in 217 to 218 we wrote a paper with many different pemans um and and our research team uh asking oops sorry asking the question um does red have a chance uh which we answered with a of does red have a chance on pea which we

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answered affirmatively for two reasons. Uh partly the pembons are very aware as a low-lying West Indian Ocean island uh very aware of climate change. Uh they love their forests. They depend on their forests as you saw. It's also very culturally homogeneous population. Um so there were a lot of reasons why red we uh believed uh would take root and actually many of these collaborators are working in the forestry department in the government or in other organizations and um they all kind of agreed that red

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was you know an exciting opportunity for pea. In addition, we had some data uh on these 18 kofi on these 18 uh Kofma uh shah uh comparing the rate of deforestation prior to 210 uh with what happened between 210 and 218. And um in half of them in the blue ones, the rate of deforestation had declined. They hadn't had payments yet, but there was evidence that the red readiness was really starting to uh kick in and have an effect. So, this is where the story starts to get sad. Um, by the time the

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paper came out in 2020, I had to accompany it with a a a blog uh called I've Got the Red Blues. Why? Because there had been no payments after 5 years. And just to um tell the whole story, there hasn't been a payment until today. And this is not because the communities were not participating or trying. As you can see already without payments, half of them were slowing down deforestation. They had these institutions and they were following them. Um and it was to do with um what we might call sort of uh

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incompetence uh from the uh western partners and I won't go into more detail maybe informally I can talk about this more but uh it's very shocking. So this put uh me in a very gray mood. Um partly because I couldn't study this kind of evolution of cooperation in the wild that I was so excited to do. But that of course is a very selfish reason. Uh far more basic was the fact that there were 18 communities across Pembo but with whom I was now very familiar who were expecting these payments and weren't

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getting them. So in my very grayest of moods when I really thought I'm not going to carry on trying to be an anthropologist exploring theoretical issues but embedding them in the real world. It's too difficult and too depressing. Uh my wonderful postto Jeff Andrews said hey come on Monique stop moping around. Let's ask how's exposure to a failed red program affected residents willingness to participate in future red schemes. So does this failure is it just going to lead to future failure or you know could

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something still be taken out of this? And we of course knew that the answer was going to be um yes but well had the exposure yes that the the communities that had been exposed to red uh who'd been let down would not be interested in uh carrying on with future red programs. They'd been burnt. Um and the reasons for this are pretty obvious and they come again from this kind of neo neoliberal criticism of red plus. Um and the first reason is that uh once you start offering people to pay them for

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things that they used to do uh either for sort of moral reasons um or for traditional sort of um commitments of of traditional management of the forest. Once you start paying people, you get this what what economists call crowding out. Crowding out of the sort of moral commitment. And so here with these communities who' sort of been promised all this money, then the the people who who were going to bring them this money walk away. You know, why on earth should we now kind of save our forests? You

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know, we we've just been so let down. We realize this product has been commodified. We're not getting the money for it. You know, what's the reason for going on? And the the second reason we thought they'd they'd be not keen to re-enter any kind of uh conservation project was because I'm sure many of you are aware of this that you know these conservation fats you know one new idea out of another one new acronym after another come out of the west get taken to the developing world get sold as the

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best way new way of solving problems and you know people sitting in these communities that I know so well are getting pretty fed up of just like you know one idea coming after another and never really seeing the benefit of it. And so we assumed the answer to this would be no. Uh we asked this question specifically. We did a what's called a WTA willing to accept. Jeff is an economist. How much would you be willing to accept to commit your household to no cutting of hardwoods for a year? And we asked them this in the um 18 red

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18 shah that have been treated by red. And then we have the blue ones there are six control shah and um we this is the data this is not actually in the paper um but this just gives you an idea of the range of the WTAs and uh the only thing I'm actually going to take out of this paper is the protest bids and you can see there that pro people who we classify as making a protest bid are people who answer saying um I want more money than actually I get in the whole year not just more money than I get from

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the forest but more more money than my whole uh annual household income. We classify those as protest bids. And what you see here, contrary to the expectation, is that the communities that have been treated by red there on the right have lower protest bids, lower number of protest bids uh than the control community. And on the left, you see what economists like to do these supply curves. And this is really the supply of conservation willingness or at least the price at which you're willing to uh offer conservation willingness.

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And you can see that the red uh treated communities basically are willing to engage for less money than the uh controls. So something's going on. We don't quite know. Could it be those co- benefits? They had all these projects as I mentioned on the side. Uh it could be. Um we haven't really got to the bottom of that. We got distracted by something else. Uh which is um that the Kofmmeras which annoyingly here I'm sorry the original 18 are now colored in green. They seem to be expanding. There's new

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things happening in other um in other Shahia. And just to make it a little bit clearer here, the green ones up there, the bar is the 18 original hea hea was the name of the red plus project. Uh the 18 original hea Shahyia. And then there's another 13 who are working to get into that scheme or similar schemes under slightly different names. So the people wanting to join, remember this is there's not been a single payment. And then there's even more on the red requesting KOFMA status. They want to

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get into it, but they haven't got very far yet. By 2024, um, I'd found by now that the Koffmas under HEA 2, um, have actually gone up to, uh, there's now 23 of them or 23. So, some of the ones from the the yellow bar higher up have now moved into, uh, they have full COFMA status. There's a whole lot more yellow ones who were sort of on the process to becoming Kofmas. And then there's another 10 who requesting to get KOFMA status. So, this is kind of puzzling. there's not been a

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single payment. So the model, the kind of mask model that I presented at the beginning um is it payoff bias transmission that they want to get these benefits. There haven't been any benefits yet. So what's going on? And the thing that occurred to us or had always been the back of our minds really was maybe theft is important. And you'll notice in this figure on the left, I didn't explain it, but there's all these arrows. Um and that's trees moving. Well, of course, you know, sort of short

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of a burn and wood going to Dun's name, trees don't normally move. Um, they are actually being stolen. So, this changed our focus a little bit and brings me to the topic of leakage, which is the technical term for basically stealing trees um within the red plus literature. Now, leakage is defined as a way of externalizing costs outside of the intended governance boundary. And you can uh I can just talk you through what this really means. This this isn't actually a Kofma. It's not a very good

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forest, but I was able to take a picture of it from the the old 1904 lighthouse in Keamasha. So imagine this is your Koffma. You live in this community. The best thing to do, of course, is to when you want to build a new boat or build a house, uh you nip across at night uh to the Kaufman next door. You can see the one across the bay. You cut down their trees. You bring them back. you use them for building and you keep your trees in really nice condition so that you can get the carbon payments. So that's

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that's the essence of leakage uh theft from outsiders. And we already had an inkling of the importance of this uh in in the original paper we we wrote when we were writing the the grant the second grant we got. Um and that is you can see here uh one bar in the black there is surrounded by a Kofma that light blue area and those guys in the light blue area are actually going into one bar and stealing trees at night to bring them back for the uh leakage rationale that I gave here. And one bar has just been dying to get Kofma

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status to develop the institutions to have the mechanisms for punishing and controlling um their harvests so that they could keep these pesky outsiders out. And in fact, WBA was one of the ones remember I said they some moved in 2024 uh into Kofma status. WBA was one of them. They were successful. So our focus of our research kind of changed a little bit um to sort of see what the role of leakage might be in the spread of conservation. We're still interested in this CMLS cascade, right? I still

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want to try and explain it uh because remember we've seen that there was an expansion of of Kofmas and uh so does leakage play a role in it? Well, at this stage, uh, we were pushed into modeling and, uh, what this what we basically did and this again was left by led by J Jeff Andrews. Um, we we developed an an agent-based model of the effects of leakage on the emergence and spread of cooperation. So, we have two we have a two-roup scenario and a multi-group scenario. And the red square there is

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the shah uh that was that is in red plus, right? that has these institutions for protecting their forests and then the green ones are neighbors who don't have the institutions and they're our experimental group and by experimental I mean what what Jeff does is he varies the amount and the intensity of leakage those blue areas the blue arrows coming out of the red shah and then looks to see what happens to the behaviors of the people living in the green shahi in the untreated shah the ones weren't in the

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red plus program. And um as unfortunately as with all models, the guts are kind of messy. Um but we're really interested uh mainly in mainly in in this area, the these two bits on the left. Uh but I'm going to start because this model is not one of a sort of benign dictator saying this is what our village should do. It's in completely the institutions that we're interested the evolution of the institutions that we're interested in should be emerging endogenously. So let's start with the middle bit there

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the harvesting. So we have agents who choose who go first of all choose whether to harvest at home in their own village in their own shah or whether they go and basically commit leakage go and harvest somewhere else. They choose how much to harvest. um they choose whether they're going to inspect other people's harvest to see whether they're uh following the rules or not. The rules we'll come back to. Uh we then have a transmission phase uh which obviously people die who didn't manage to get any

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harvest at all. Uh and in that transmission we have social learning where agents on the basis of the payoff that sorry I didn't mention was calculated at the end of the harvesting phase. uh you choose who to imitate, who to copy, what strategy to copy uh depending on on the the um payoffs that you see both in your own group and of people in the other group. Uh then we have a phase of ecological dynamics. Trees cut down, trees grow. Of course, you can change play around with those dynamics. We then have a politics phase

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which when the agents come back and they basically aggregate their beliefs about what would be the best way to self-regulate to control the amount of harvest that they take. We call this the mah the maximum allowable harvest. How much do we feel can be harvested from this area? And and so that's what happens there. That's the regulation. That's what we would call uh user rights. And then uh individuals have to decide how much effort they're going to put into keeping outsiders out, which

00:38:59
involves going on patrols, involves providing uh inspecting other people's harvests. And if you do that, you can see some of their harvest. There's some payoff to that strategy. And I'm not going to take you through the whole of the modeling because it's a Wednesday afternoon and we've got a party to go to, right? Um I'm just going to there there is a paper here behind it. There are two papers actually behind this. Um, but I'm just going to very quickly cover the two sort of very clear

00:39:26
results that come out of this. First of all, in the two group scenario, as I say there, leakage increases support for exclusion but erodess inroup regulatory institutions. And the logic here is is pretty easy to explain. Uh, so think in the two group one up there. the um the pressure uh obviously the the uh green ones who are the experimental ones as they experience more leakage uh they start to build up their they're kind of keeping people out the um the exclusion uh uh behaviors. But in the model, it's

00:40:02
extremely hard to find a sweet spot where there's enough leak enough um theft coming out of the red one to motivate the green guys to protect their boundaries, but not too much so as to completely undercut the rationale for protecting your forest because what's the point in developing your own self-regulation if other people are coming in and taking your stuff away, right? So that's that's the the the inference from there. In the multigroup uh um scenario, the situation's a bit different. Same thing

00:40:38
we we Jeff would would um sort of ratchet up the leakage that comes out of the red shah and that causes everybody all of these surrounding shah to all start stealing from each other. So there's a massive amount of theft going on, a massive amount of leakage. And this leads to the communities to have very strong exclusion rates. They really really try to keep outsiders out or they punish outsiders if they find them. And then once you've got those very strong outside boundaries, the there's more

00:41:09
space for sort of the emergence of self-regulation uh through basically under the cultural multi-level selection dynamics because you you you're kind of safe that your common pool resources are going to be there for you because you've kept everybody else out. So we um this was well this is the model um as I mean those of you who are modelers there's obviously some kind of um classic a lot of voltera dynamics going on here and I mean there's all kinds of scenarios um and of course you

00:41:42
can play around with all of the parameters you can get different kinds of results but this was the main story that we got out of it and the way we published this really more is is um as the co-evolution of ostrams to you know osprams many of you will Astronom's design principles for managing comable resources. Um she has these uh two the the user rights and the access rights and what this paper is really doing is showing how those institutions can emerge indogenously. You don't need a sort of outside benign dictator uh

00:42:13
coming up with the ideal way to manage a forest because of course there's nobody who knows that these things emerge from the behaviors of individuals. So um the model um has some kind of predictions or they're sort of partly assumptions, partly predictions. Uh the first is that the more you have theft from outsiders, the more effort you're going to invest in exclusion. And uh here we use some data that I I spend an awful lot lot of time in PBE hanging out with these Shahier conservation

00:42:44
committees um who are the institutions I was talking about earlier sort of established under red plus particularly with my incredible research uh collaborator here Assaar and we just basically we go back to these communities every year and we just chitchat with them what's going on what are the problems what are you know challenges what are the successes you know and use use what we learn from them to sort develop a long-term database on on how these shah are managing to manage their forests. And although I a lot of

00:43:17
it is chitchat, I also collecting quantitative data. Um but I don't do it kind of like how much theft do you have? You know, it's sort of that's not really a very polite question. I gauge it from these more general conversations that we have. And what we do find that is indeed in the shah this is data with 42 of these um Shahia committee conservation meetings. uh basically over uh monitored over five years. What we find is that where there is more outside theft from outside, we do get more investment in

00:43:49
exclusion um activities such as boundary marking. People put up um well there's all kinds of ways of marking boundaries. Um the number of arrests, uh number of patrols, um and reporting uh cases to outside authorities if they can't be adjudicated locally. And whereas in the in the Shah where there's much less theft, we have less of this. Now there's a cause a causality problem here as there is with any locker dynamics because you know as the number of prey go up the you know the response changes.

00:44:20
Um but this is at least a sort of a general uh support for uh some of the predictions of the model. A much better study um is that was um is what we were doing here um is looking to see whether a successful exclusion of leakage uh contributes to internal regulation. So that was really the prediction of the second model and this was work that was done by Matt Clark a graduate student who was working with us who focused on all of the shah in pea uh that have mangrove forest all 49 of them and he did used participatory mapping uh with

00:44:57
groups of men and women and then in these uh maps that they had in each of the uh grid squares they would mark uh the quality of the mangro forest so that's kind of how thick is mangro forest Is it is it nicely packed or is it what they call kind of open? Um and then also um how heavily that square was affected by theft from outside. And then he also had a question at the end for each group as to what they what they thought for their shah the the mah should be the maximum allowable harvest.

00:45:31
and uh putting all of these and and Matt worked here together with also another amazing uh research collaborator Haj Hamat um what he found was consistent with the predictions that where um the theft from outside is well controlled you can see that well what we have on the y-axis here is the bundles uh that can uh the bundles of firewood that can be collected which is the way we operationalize this concept of mah uh for this particular particular population. And um you can see that uh it's lowish and um they it responds only

00:46:09
weekly, but it does respond to the state of the mangrove forest, which is kind of interesting that people when they see that their mangrove is in bad condition, that it's quite open, uh they're deciding to lower the uh bundles that can be collected. However, when the theft from the outside is uncontrolled, you get completely the opposite pattern. you basically get um the effectively it's a race to the bottom right so outsiders are taking our mangrove it's in bad nick uh let's just cut it all

00:46:38
down and make private profits out of it and try and make some other kind of livelihood so uh you get these very different patterns so I'm going to end um with uh just a couple of reflections on red plus in pea uh which I break down into the good the bad and the ugly I'll start with the bad. It's not particularly surprising, but uh our sort of final satellite imagery uh work on this led by another grad student Amy Collins, we looked at the uh observed forest cover change between 2010 and

00:47:14
2018. So during the project and afterwards and you can here it's what we're looking at is the observed on uh plotted on the predicted. The predictor is based on classic things that people do with forestry work. You know, the slope, population, uh density of the shah, closeness to an urban area, all the kinds of things that might well we have shown do affect uh forest loss. And I mean, if the red shah were doing well, you would expect them all to be above the line um or to be more likely to be

00:47:48
above the line than the the dots that are not covered colored red. Uh but this is not the case. Uh but this is hardly surprising. Um as you know there have been no red plane payments and were far you know already when this data was uh this is up to 218 already they'd had three years without being paid and um they had not slowed down and our more recent data that we haven't published yet suggests that they still haven't slowed down again not surprisingly. But there's that's one reason, but

00:48:18
there's a much more ugly reason, and that is that the go there's a a continuing erosion of government uh of government uh national support for communities to sustainably manage their forests. And this is exemplified by you can just turn up in a place where you were maybe, you know, a year ago and you suddenly find a sign like this has been sold to the East African Investment Maitius Limited. Nobody knows who they are. They're apparently going to build a a mo motorway build a an airport um on

00:48:51
this island. Um and another sign here, the construction of the Manuli Eco Loge, which I'm going to come back to in a moment. And so with that kind of uh loss of security of tenure, the whole rationale for sustainably managing your forest is obviously deeply undercut. So that is really the ugly. I did say there's a good and there is a good. Um this again you've seen this slide before but I didn't point out that about 7% of the population are um don't want any money at all. They will go into a new

00:49:22
program without being given without being given a scent. And these guys we call uh guys men and women we call uh deontological conservationists. They just truly care about protecting the forest and they'll do anything they can. And a wonderful example of it is this guy Malopee who every morning goes to this tree which got cut down a while ago. Uh he calls it his motivation tree. He goes there and it just he says it gives him the energy to keep on working on trying to protect the forests in his

00:49:52
community. And uh then there are other kind of clever ideas. Um people in some villages you know I mentioned earlier that the army and the um Tampa has a very complicated uh political relationship with the rest of Tanzania. There's a lot of army and police station there because there's a lot of violence against the state and the these army and police often come into these communities and cut down their trees and then sell them to make money and people now dig these holes in the middle of a path and then

00:50:18
these guys who come with their ox carts fall into them and I mean of course you know I mean it's great that the they get caught um of course they never get tried uh but of course the trees already been cut so you know it's sort of after the fact but you know it is nice that there's still a lot of motivation people trying to protect their forests. So that's the ugly. And um I've got two um concluding slides like three more minutes and then I'm done. Um the first is just to as I said I was kind of going

00:50:49
to tell a story about how the relationship between theory as you can tell although I haven't gone deeply into the theory underlying this but I'm basically an evolutionary anthropologist you know strongly committed to theoretical analysis of human behavior. uh one of our behaviors is cooperation and that's a big puzzle. Uh so how do we link theory to empirical evidence that of course we all need to do and as anthropologists were very good at collecting this kind of data and then the reality what happens in the real

00:51:19
world of politics and circumstance and crooked western partnic parties and whatever. Um, and so I told a story that started with uh discovering red on holiday that just happened in in the real world going on a holiday led me to develop uh or at least to apply a cultural multi-level selection model uh based on a payoff bias transmission um under uh PEZ um under PEZ incentives. under the the the carbon payment incentives. This was hit by reality very strongly and very sadly by the fact that there

00:51:55
were had been no there were no payments and there have been no payments until today. Then in terms of evidence we found kind of weird things. We found these rather low WTA people were still keen to carry on working uh with conservation organizations even though they've been burnt so badly and we were seeing the expansion of the KOFMAS institutional expansion despite the absence of payments with this led us to uh thinking about what's going on and we uh got more interested in leakage and developed a

00:52:28
slightly different model uh using agentbased model to what the role of theft and leakage might be and led us to some po some some empirical support for the way we were modeling this new way of thinking about the emergence of cooperation and but then we sort of been slapped in the face again by reality that there have been there's been no political buying and that takes me back to this sign and to this sign that just discovered um last summer no no 2024 was just slapped up outside the village that

00:52:59
we do a lot of our work in that this eco lodge, this sevenstar eco loge was going to be built um on that beautiful beach that you saw a picture of at the beginning, taking the whole beach away from the communities. It's we obviously they use it not just for for festivals but for fishing and for seaweed collection and for all kinds of things these u and and then the forest behind it. So this has led to well this is the foresty voomimi nature forest. It's the only reserve in in natural reserve in in

00:53:32
Pembber. The lodge the cult the calculations that I've taken from the architect site uh takes up 24% of this forest. And it's this forest is one of the main things that draws the few tourists who do come to Pen come for this forest. and um a group of led by my husband, a group of of of botonists and and um entomologists who had a letter in science a couple of weeks ago about the loss of biodiversity. I think there three species new to science uh that that are in this area of forest that's

00:54:05
going to get taken away uh plus about six or seven endemics that are very rare um that are going to go. So they wrote this and then there's been they've written um other kind of more popular articles in Monga Bay to to try to draw attention to what's going on. Um, I've kept my name off the east because my role as an anthropologist is to work with the communities and as John mentioned earlier, I've done that a lot in western Tanzania and so we work together with the communities to

00:54:34
establish the engage of a wimpy heritage organization and with them now we're working trying to and I'm looking talking about this here because I really would like input and suggestions from people how to do this how to work to try to instill some sort of citizen action against what's going on in what is basically a a one party state where I don't know if any of you been following the elections in Tanzania but there's been a huge amount of violence and people are very frightened to talk out against the

00:55:05
government. So how to try to build community well awareness is there but action and how to um translate that into actually having political effect is super complicated and we've also founded something called friends of engage uh registered in UK to try to raise money to support this initiative and actually just uh yesterday uh this art this article basically picked up on the science paper um and we're trying to get this more into the Tanzanian literature the the headline binaries were worth thinking but uh um

00:55:40
researchers want u the building of the hotel of the hotel in Benghazi to be uh moved elsewhere to so we don't want to stop tourism obviously tourism brings money to developing countries but it is being built in the wrong place and it's not only going to have major negative effects on biodiversity uh but also on community livelihood I've got a whole other talk on that but I won't talk about that today but if there's anyone in this audience or any organizations within your institution who um are

00:56:10
interested in providing volunteers or or volunteering expertise or or even donating money to friends of engage. We'd be uh super interested because we're absolutely fighting this on a day-to-day basis at the moment. So that brings me to the end. Thanks to all of you. Thanks to all the people in the engy organazi vuma wimbey heritage organization the department of forestry who strangely as an anthropologist we actually work with very closely there's strange reasons for that the most of the

00:56:38
people working for the government in pa uh don't actually support government um and then uh lots of uh uh collaborators in the research that I've reported on and um help from funding organizations that's all I got to say thanks.