Trust, hope, and collective action in fragile political settings: A qualitative comparative analysis of water user groups in Tunisia
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Under systemic fragility, research users see collective action as a substitute to the state. • Social trust is frequently associated with higher levels of fee recovery in water user groups. • Aquifer depletion and hopelessness lead to conflict among water users. • Effects of trust and hope are conditional on context. Collective action theory acknowledges that self-governing institutional arrangements, such as water user groups, can successfully develop strategies to address natural resource problems. However, studies of collective action have largely neglected the role of social, political and/or ecological fragility, where institutional trust and hope may have been eroded over time, and where natural resources are severely depleted. This paper uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to examine the pathways that mediate the multi-faceted relationship between trust, hope, and collective action in the context of water user groups, addressing resource scarcity challenges in post-authoritarian Tunisia. The analyses are based on data from archival sources, key informant interviews, hydrogeological models, local inventories, and semi-structured interviews with members of 15 local water user groups in the Tunisian governorate of Kairouan. Results from Qualitative Comparative Analyses shed light on dynamics of trust and hope as well as the substitutability of shared norms under given ecological conditions. Results demonstrate that water users see social trust-based systems as an alternative to the coercive power of the state. Specifically we find that: (1) social cohesion and the expectation that other water users stick to local, often informal, rules were found to increase collective action, i.e. fee recovery, under systemic fragility; (2) resource scarcity, i.e. aquifer depletion, can serve as a driver of both conflict as well as cooperation, depending on conjoint social-ecological interactions; and, finally, (3) conflict is more frequently associated with low-hope environments, where users are unable to perceive the possibility of positive system change. These insights seek to inform more realistic policy reforms that are sensitive to a fragile water governance system prone to social unrest.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it