Collective Action: Government Policies and Programs

People often engage in collective actions undertaken by a group as a whole. This chapter introduces the toolkit of economics used to analyze government policies and programs, aiming to understand the political economy of collective actions at all scales from local to global. Governments are important actors in agriculture and food systems, providing public-sector goods and services through programs financed with tax revenue and by expanding the money supply. Governments also regulate private activity through public policies, legislation and law enforcement. Non-governmental organizations also take collective actions, but their membership is voluntary whereas governments have sovereignty over people within their borders. The first section of this chapter shows how the analytical diagrams developed for individual choices are adapted to understand collective actions, and then applied to real-world problems of governing agriculture and the food system. The second section explains how analysts obtain data on the social, environmental or health-related aspects of food as well as market production and consumption, to guide decisions that take account of how much people value those nonmarket aspects of life. Nonmarket values are a major driver of collective action, as people seek policies and programs that not only deliver higher economic surplus from production and consumption, but also use government policies and programs to address externalities and provide public goods.