This paper links changing global coffee markets to opportunities and vulnerabilities for sustaining small-scale farmer livelihoods in northern Nicaragua. Changing governance structures, corporate concentration, oversupply, interchangeable commodity grade beans, and low farm gate prices...

The economic literature of property rights has been assessing the impact of different community based arrangements on the efficiency of natural resource management of specific areas. Differently, other strands of development economics and policy-oriented research have been concerned with issues...

Inadequate access to safe water has severe consequences for health and livelihood. More than one billion people do not have access to safe water. This paper addresses three questions: 1) How could a focus on social relations illuminate access to water? 2) Is there statistical evidence of a...

Like “nature,†“culture,†and its glamorous sibling “global,†“local†is one of those deeply compromised words our language will not relinquish. So central to so many anthropological projects it is unlikely to be transcended, instead it continues to be...

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), an inverted-U relationship between pollution and income, is an influential generalization about the way environmental quality changes as a country makes the transition from poverty to relative affluence. The EKC predicts that pollution will first increase,...

The economic literature of property rights has been assessing the impact of different community based arrangements on the efficiency of natural resource management of specific areas. Differently, other strands of development economics and policy-oriented research have been concerned with issues...

Climate change involves fundamental international asymmetries in terms of its sources and impacts. The World Development Report 2010 presents an optimistic picture of the possibilities for tackling global warming, its optimism rather at odds with the gloomy prospects that may well be in store...