Social capital dynamics and collective action: the role of subjective satisfaction in a common pool resource experiment

In low income countries grass-root collective action for the management of a common environmental resource is a well-known substitute for government provision of public goods. In our research we test experimentally what is its effect on social capital. To this purpose we structure a “sandwich” experiment in which participants play a common pool resource game (CPRG) between two trust games in a Nairobi slum where social capital is scarce but informal rules regulating the commons are abundant. Our findings show that the change in trustworthiness between the two trust game rounds generated by the CPRG experience is crucially affected by the subjective satisfaction about the CPRG rather than by standard objective measures related to CPRG players’ behavior. These results highlight that subjective satisfaction in a collective action has relevant predictive power on social capital creation providing information which can be crucial to design successful self-organized environmental resource regimes.