Events

Mr. Chiman Cheung
PhD candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
University of California, Berkeley

Information can spur community collective action against environmental harms, but its effectiveness depends on how it is delivered and by whom. Local leaders can legitimize and transmit new information, or distort and suppress it when incentives misalign. I study these trade-offs in the context of artisanal and small-scale gold mining (galamsey) in Ghana. I conduct a cluster randomized controlled trial across 99 galamsey communities, stratified by leaders’ conflicts of interest, comparing two information diffusion strategies: seeding, in which a documentary on mercury’s health risks is screened privately to leaders (traditional local chiefs), and broadcasting, in which the same documentary is screened publicly to both leaders and community members. Seeding improved health-risk learning among chiefs but had no detectable effects on community learning, preferences over local mining regulation, or community engagement. Broadcasting, in contrast, increased community learning and engagement, as reflected in higher sign-ups for regular assembly meetings and more frequent community discussion of galamsey. When paired with non-conflicted chiefs, broadcasting shifted community preferences toward stricter local mining regulation; under conflicted chiefs, broadcasting instead polarized these preferences. Taken together, the results suggest that while broad public information can mobilize community engagement on its own, building consensus over local mining regulation requires both an informed public and non-conflicted leadership; neither alone is sufficient.