The North China Plain is the country's granary: most of wheat and maize is supplied by this region in the northeast of China. Intensity of agricultural production has risen sharply in the last decades and the negative environmental effects like water scarcity, salinization and nitrate contamination have been widely acknowledged. In the wake of the country's rapid economic development it becomes at the same time more and more urgent to narrow the gap between the well-being of the urban and rural population.

Market-based instruments (MBIs) are promoted as economically efficient, targeted solutions to otherwise intractable environmental policy problems with additional potential to improve the livelihood security of ecosystem service providers.

Question: How can quantitative data from vegetation surveys best be assembled in a large regional vegetation database? What effects have intellectual property rights concerns of individual and institutional data holders on data contribution and how can incentives to contribute data be generated? Location: West Africa, with discussion of a possible approach to dealing with property rights concerns being of wider interest.

Forest is an important natural resource to the Latvian economy. It is useful to examine the historical context to estimate objectively the events that created the structure of forest property rights today. While 50.3% of all Latvian forests are state-owned and the remaining 49.7% are under different ownership, historically this structure has changed with the political situation and the authorities.

Water demand in a viable economy tends to be dynamic: it changes over time in response to growth, drought, and social policy. Institutional capacity to re-allocate water between users and uses under stress from multiple sources is a key concern. Climate change threatens to add to those stresses in snowmelt systems by changing the timing of runoff and possibly increasing the severity and duration of drought. This article examines Snake and Klamath River institutions for their ability to resolve conflict induced by demand growth, drought, and environmental constraints on water use.

This research examines the effect of risk and time preferences on forest management responses to forest tenure land reforms in Fujian, China that began in 2002. The different extent of the reform and its different timing across regions provide a natural experiment to test how time and risk preferences affect a households’ forest investment response to the reform.

Conservation easements (or conservation covenants) are commonly conceptualized as acquisitions of sticks in a ‘bundle of rights’ and are increasingly implemented for wildlife conservation on private lands. This research asks: (1) What are the possibilities and limitations of the conservation easement approach to wildlife conservation in contrasting rural and periurban regions? and (2) How does analysis of conservation easements differ when examining property as a bundle of rights or alternative metaphors?

This paper aims to make a modest contribution to an overdue need to locate the current land rush in its historical context, less as a new phenomenon than as a surge in the continuing capture of ordinary people's rights and assets by capital-led and class-creating social transformation. It aims to do so by looking back to earlier land rushes, and particularly to those which have bearing upon sub-Saharan Africa, the site of most large-scale involuntary land loss today. In particular, the paper focuses upon a central tool of land rushes, property law.

This article reviews intellectual property rights (IPRs), with some emphasis on the protection of agricultural and life sciences innovations. The main institutional features of IPRs are first discussed, along with a brief historical background and an articulation of the main rationale for the existence of such rights. This is followed by an overview of the principal economic issues related to IPRs.

In this article, the attempt is made to address regime interaction in environmental governance by emphasising human livelihood action as a causal factor in this interaction. The paper elucidates how governing human behaviour on environmental resources is a process of interaction between different environmental governance regimes.