Environmental protection and poverty alleviation in the developing world are usually heralded as joint objectives. However, these two goals are often associated with different sectoral policy instruments. While so-called payments for environmental services (PES) are increasingly being promoted...

This paper addresses the relationship between equity and efficiency in PES schemes from a conceptual point of view. Emphasis is placed on the role of the institutional setting, social perceptions about economic fairness (or distributive justice of the payments), uncertainty and interactions...

This article provides an alternative and novel theoretical approach to the conceptualization and analysis of payments for environmental services (PES). We devote special emphasis to institutional and political economy issues, which have been somewhat neglected in the literature on PES. We argue...

Environmental policy instruments generate transaction costs to public and private parties. There is a growing literature reporting on the size of transaction costs produced by environmental policy instruments. This paper extends that literature through an analysis of the factors that influence...

The paper reports on a field experiment that investigates whether households in Guatemala are willing to surrender a small material gain in order to buy legal rather than illegal firewood. Given the ineffectiveness of command-and-control policies to curb the problem of illegal logging in...