The lecture is organised by the CAS project What is a Good Policy? Political Morality, Feasibility, and Democracy (GOODPOL).

Practical information

This seminar will be a hybrid event. This means people can attend physically or online via Zoom. If you wish to join via Zoom, please register using the link below. The organisers will share login detail with registered participants before the event.

About the seminar

Studies on common-pool resource usage usually focus on situations where actors use said resources in a symmetric way. However, many real-world cases do not fit this scenario as users are often in asymmetric positions regarding their ability to benefit from the resource. Examples range from irrigation systems to climate change mitigation.  

This lecture asks whether giving participants an opportunity to communicate helps to solve asymmetric common-pool resource problems. Furthermore, it questions whether specific rules of discussion can add to the effects of communication. The rules in questions approximate the ideals of democratic deliberation.  

This lecture draws on an incentivized experiment where participants played a sequential asymmetric common-pool resource game. The experiment showed that both communication and deliberation increase investments in the common-pool resource. However, deliberation appeared to attenuate the order effect more than communication. Results suggest that deliberation may be a powerful method to overcome asymmetric commons dilemmas. 

About the speaker

Jonathan William Kuyper is a political theorist and international relations scholar who is an associate professor at the Department of political science at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on democratic theory, particularly the role of democracy in a globalizing world, the nature of political representation, and legitimacy of international negotiations. He has written on topics such as intellectual property rights, climate change, trade governance, and investment. Prior to joining the University of Oslo, he was a Lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, a postdoc at the University of Oslo, and a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University. He completed his PhD at the Australian National University in the International Relations department.  

The seminar is organized as part of the project GOODPOL, hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (CAS).