Fairness, institutional credibility and regional governance: explaining collective action for river restoration in the Ganga basin

Transboundary rivers require collective action, yet contested burden sharing, fragmented authority and institutional credibility complicate restoration finance. We examine the Ganga basin through a stakeholder survey (n = 490 across five states), an incentivised 2 × 2 experiment with non-governmental organisation (NGO) professionals (n = 180) and district-level summaries linked to ecological and monitoring indicators. Four research questions distinguish perception associations, contribution-cue effects, cognitive-reflection moderation and territorial variation. In the survey, perceived unfairness and inter-state coordination failure are negatively associated with support. The positive industrial-share association weakens under sanction-centric framing, while perceived severity and monitoring effectiveness exhibit positive complementarity. In the experiment, the enhanced matching-and-verification package and stewardship framing have positive treatment-by-risk interactions and a negative cue-by-cue interaction on the conditional log-odds scale. Cognitive reflection is associated with lower responsiveness to the matching/verification package and greater responsiveness to stewardship framing. Spatial summaries document uneven stated support across states and districts, but do not identify regional moderation of the mechanisms. Together, these findings develop a conditional account of collective financing that distinguishes survey associations, experimental treatment contrasts, heterogeneity along measured cognitive reflection, and descriptive regional variation.