The evolution and importance of 'rules-in-use' and low-level penalties in village-level collective action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa community water points are provided through external support in the form of enhanced boreholes fitted with hand pumps. The external agency supplying the improved water source commonly provides maintenance training and assists in organising a governance plan for the water point. Despite its apparent virtues the Village-Level Operation and Maintenance model still experiences high levels of water point failures, even where the technical training and material conditions are adequate. There has been relatively little investigation of the institutional factors that may influence the cases where villages successfully maintain their shared water source infrastructure. This research investigated five villages in central Malawi where communities had maintained their water point hand pumps for periods exceeding 10 years. The results point to the importance of informal institutions giving primacy to ad-hoc 'rules-in-use' that suit the local context, and adapting forms of free-rider sanctions that are typically minor, low level and triangulated with local norms and behaviours. The findings highlight collective action that is successful through day-to-day adaption and that serves to institutionalise cooperative behaviour through appeals to norms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".