Although the importance of science, in both desertification control and other types of environmental governance, has been emphasized by many studies, little is known about how science influences institutional changes. Based on a method combining surveys, interviews, observation, and a meta-analysis of the literature, this study explored the roles of science in institutional changes associated with desertification control in northern China.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) and spatial property rights (TURFs) are two seemingly contradictory approaches advocated as solutions to common property failures in fisheries. MPAs limit harvest to certain areas, but may enhance profits outside via spillover. TURFs incentivize local stewardship but may be plagued by spatial externalities when the TURF size is insufficient to capture all dispersal. Within a numerical model parameterized to a California marine species, we explore the economic and ecological effects of imposing MPAs on a TURF-regulated fishery.

Overcapacity is a major problem in common-pool resources. Regulators increasingly turn from limited entry to individual transferable use rights to address overcapacity. Using individual vessel data from before and after the introduction of individual harvest rights into a fishery, the paper investigates how characteristics of rights, scale of operations and transition period affect changes in individual and fleet capacity utilisation and excess capacity.

Replacing petroleum fuels with biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel has been shown to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These GHG benefits can potentially be traded in the fledgling carbon markets, and methodologies for quantifying and trading are still being developed. We review the main challenges in developing such carbon trading frameworks and outline a proposed framework for the US, the main features of which include, lifecycle assessment of GHG benefits, a combination of project-specific and standard performance measures, and assigning GHG property rights to biofuel producers.

Abstract—Existing research treats the cooperative structure as relatively homogeneous. The proposed paper argues that all cooperatives are not created equal – and consideration of organizational structure is critical when analyzing the economic impact of cooperation.

Although efforts in improving forest rights across developing countries are growing, de jure property rights and physical ownership of forests do not automatically enable farmers to obtain benefits from forests. Their access to forest benefits is limited by a range of legal and extralegal mechanisms.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) are considered effective market-based conservation approaches. Surprisingly, limited evidence is conceptualized from a gendered perspective despite widespread knowledge of men's and women's roles as resource users. This study unravels this puzzle by exploring the extent to which three schemes in Kenya integrate gender in design and implementation.

This article presents a model to help explain the transition path from one water management system to another, typically a commons framework to one of tradable permit‐based property rights. Furthermore, drawing from transaction cost literature, the model demonstrates how this takes place when externalities (the strain on water resources) become severe enough to warrant the increased transaction costs inherent with more complex water rights management frameworks.

The article addresses the role the European Union plays in the agri-environmental policy and considers the co-financing of agri-environmental programmes in Germany. First, the development of measures taken under this policy is described from the 1980ies until the present Agenda 2000, taking especially into account the effects of financial promotion by the EU. In addition, a view on nature conservation and water protection reveals the sometimes conflicting interactions between agri-environmental measures and other areas and instruments of environmental policy.

Transferable offsets are a means of mitigating the adverse environmental impacts of resource developments. Based on insights from institutional economics, there are three elements that need to be in place for offsets to be effective: (1) property rights over the mitigating good can be defined and assigned; (2) a difference exists between the marginal cost of supplying the mitigating good and the community's marginal value for it; and (3) the transaction costs of exchanging the mitigating good are less than the trade benefit.

I argue in this paper that transaction cost is central to the analytics of climate adaptation in the local commons. I illustrate this by bringing together insights from Coase on tradability of property rights, Ostrom on institutional design principles for long lived commons and Williamson on transaction cost and governance mechanisms. I call this the COW model on the analytics of climate adaptation, which I illustrate using grounded theory in the case of the 400-year old zangjera irrigation societies in Northern Philippines.

This paper examines the role of the extended family on investments in children, usingdata from a retrospective survey of three generations in the rural Philippines. Econometricresults show that interactions between grandparent characteristics and child gendersignificantly affect the distribution of proposed land bequests between sons and daughters.However, grandparents significantly affect gender-specific investments in children'seducation only in resource-constrained families.