The current debate on trade liberalization is accompanied by an increased concern about environmental and food safety issues leading to frictions of different country groups under the World Trade Organization (WTO). This discussion paper aims at shedding more light on some of the issues in the...

This paper focuses on the interactions between local communities having at least some degree of informal claims over natural resources and external agents, particularly firms interested in commercial resource exploitation. The paper makes three contributions to the existing literature. First,...

Participatory approaches aim at achieving representation of a broad segment of local communities, including poor and marginalized groups in natural resource management. Focusing on the case of Joint Forest Management (JFM) in India, this paper analyzes three levels of participation (attendance...