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...

Auctions, or competitive tenders, can overcome information asymmetries to efficiently allocate limited funding for ecosystem services. Most auctions focus on ecosystem services on individual properties to maximise the total amount provided. However, for many services it is not just the total...

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...

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...

The interest in agricultural soils as global storage of carbon has increased in recent years, along with the prospect of farmers' participation in payment schemes under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto protocol. Thus, a better understanding of agricultural practices that can increase...

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...

Ecological rehabilitation is subject to a variety of risks affecting the likely return on investment. We propose an options approach to allocating scarce conservation funds that explicitly allows for the irreversibility of investment and risks to investment payoffs. The approach captures...

There is a growing literature reporting the extent of transaction costs for environmental policies. However understanding why transaction costs occur and why they are small or large is also important for efficient policy selection and evaluation. Following an analysis of the organisational...

Water markets and associated allocation policy reforms have struggled to achieve their intended goals in many water-stressed rivers, in part due to the institutional friction imposed by transition and transaction costs. This paper elaborates a transaction costs analysis framework to examine the...