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Acknowledgments M uch of this book was drafted around the dining room table of a country house on Pender Island in British Columbia. Although we faced many challenges in analyzing data and melding our four distinct voices into one, one of the greatest hurdles we confronted involved conserving water from the well that fed our writing retreat. A long shower, too many loads of laundry, a tap left running— such actions by a colleague would be enough to endanger our water supply and potentially leave our well dry for days on end. As it turns out, the management of water resources on Pender is a critical issue in town politics more generally. While the house in which we stayed generates water from a well, most households on the island draw from a rain-fed reservoir. During the month we spent on Pender— in the middle of the summer—the demand for water far outstripped the supply. Households were exhorted to conserve, but as with any common pool resource, it was difficult to control people’s choices. Any household’s water usage was a private matter, and residents made decisions based on what they needed or wanted, not taking into account the consequences of their actions for the overall availability of water for others . Figuring out how to provide incentives for people to conserve was a critical town priority. One day, as we were driving around the island taking a break from our writing, we stumbled across the town’s solution to the problem. On a big billboard we found a list of residents’ names with a number indicating how much water each household had used in the previous week. This number was easily compared to the target usage per household posted at the top of the billboard. Here on Pender Island, facing a situation in which households had every incentive to overuse a common pool resource, town members sought explicitly to change people’s calculus. By making information about water usage publicly available, it was hoped that the threat of social sanctions might lead people to conserve. Pender Island is thousands of miles away from the poor, urban neighborhoods of Kampala, Uganda, which are the focus of this book, but the challenge of organizing a community to act collectively to solve its problems is a universal one. On Pender Island, town residents needed to prevent individual households from using too much water. In the poorest communities across the developing world, local leaders seek to mobilize people to police the streets, maintain public infrastructure, dispose of garbage in an organized fashion, and contribute limited funds to underresourced schools and clinics. In both contexts, the challenge is almost identical: individual incentives to shirk (for example, by overusing water or not contributing to the production of a public good) have the potential to undermine collective well-being. This challenge appears to be particularly severe in the presence of high levels of ethnic diversity. A decade’s worth of scholarship has demonstrated—from the villages of East Africa to the mountains of Pakistan to the cities of the United States—that diverse communities experience lower levels of public goods provision. In this book, we seek to figure out why. Our goal is to understand how diversity so often impedes the ability of communities to act collectively. At the same time, we seek to uncover what it is about shared ethnicity that often facilitates cooperation. The example provided by the residents of Pender Island is powerful: institutional innovations that rely on the power of social sanctioning can help communities maintain their common pool resources. Just because residents have an incentive to overuse a resource or to avoid contributing to a public good does not mean they will. Communities have tools at their disposal that can alter the decisions that individuals make. But whether this sort of institutional fix can work in Kampala or more broadly in diverse communities depends on what it is about diversity that gets in the way of social cooperation. Finding an answer to this question is a task that has consumed us for nearly a decade. Our intellectual journey began when all four of us were graduate students at Harvard University. We shared a common tutor, Robert Bates, who patiently shared with us his accumulated wisdom about the politics of ethnicity in Africa; who gently prodded us to explore new theoretical approaches and empirical methodologies; and who, by his example and through his encouragement, gave us the confidence to...

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