The theory of international environmental agreements overwhelmingly assumes that governments engage as unitary agents. Each government makes choices based on benefits and costs that are simple national aggregates, and similarly on a single set of national-level motivations, together drawing a...

This paper examines the role of other-regarding behavior as a mechanism for the establishment and maintenance of cooperation in resource use under variable social and environmental conditions. By coupling resource stock dynamics with social dynamics concerning compliance to a social norm...

Growing empirical evidence points to the importance of social norms for achieving sustainable use of common pool resources (CPR). Social norms can facilitate the cooperation and collective action needed to sustainable share a common resource. With global change, however, the social and...

Cooperation between countries is required to overcome major societal problems, such as climate change. However, rational logic dictates that individual countries are incentivised not to act, instead preferring to �free ride� on the efforts of others. It is possible to imagine a...

Ecological regime shifts are rarely purely ecological. Not only is the regime shift frequently triggered by human activity, but the responses of relevant actors to ecological dynamics are often crucial to the development and even existence of the regime shift. Here,we show that the dynamics of...

We explored experimentally how threshold uncertainty affects coordination success in a threshold public goods game. Whereas all groups succeeded in providing the public good when the exact value of the threshold was known, uncertainty was generally detrimental for the public good provision. The...

International efforts to provide global public goods often face the challenges of coordinating national contributions and distributing costs equitably in the face of uncertainty, inequality, and free-riding incentives. In an experimental setting, we distribute endowments unequally among a group...

This paper examines the impact of electoral cycles and the introduction of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) policy upon the holding of small-scale mining property rights in Guyana. Mining is both the major cause of deforestation and the main economic activity in the...

Climate policy required that much of the world�s reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned. This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry. Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

The paper analyses the implications of landowners� option values in land allocation and derives policy recommendations for payments for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). Given that REDD will not represent a permanent change in the cumulative flux of carbon...