Forest loss and degradation remains a leading environmental problem. The long history of sustainable forest management has often failed to meet expectations - constrained by funding, governance, capacity and competing interests. Initiatives from the climate change policy arena are opening new...

This paper empirically examines the emergence and functioning of land markets and their impacts on deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia. While the evolution of land markets is expected to promote deforestation activities by rural households, we find no sizeable impact, due to two major reasons....

This paper addresses the value of bioprospection for genetic resources (GR) and traditional knowledge (TK) from the South for industrial/research input. The focus is on a dynamic approach to contracting and property rights building upon insights from evolutionary institutional economics. Drawing...

This paper examines the use the use of economic incentives for knowledge generation through biodiscovery, in the particular case of the use of a highly valuable biogenetic resource stock from the South for industrial/research input. The focus is on a dynamic approach to contracting and property...

The availability of basic assets influences peasants’ economic behavior, their livelihood diversification strategies and their responses to land degradation. In addition, when pressed by economic hardships households can also expected to work more than better off ones. Whether this implies more...

This paper analyses the relationship between rural poverty and soil degradation in the context of a shifting cultivating community. A deterministic optimal control model demonstrates how a representative household's labour allocation affects the natural resource base on which its livelihood...

One of the main problems that public institutions face in the management of protected areas, such as the European Natura 2000 network, is how to design and implement sustainable management plans accounting both for the social cost and benefits of conserving these sites. This paper provides with...

Making decisions about optimal investments in green infrastructure necessitates setting social discount rates. This paper suggests a practical way for determining the discount rate for projects or programmes in which one of the options is to maintain or improve land in its natural state. We...

This paper analyses the relationship between rural poverty and soil degradation in the context of a shifting cultivating community. A deterministic optimal control model demonstrates how a representative household's labour allocation affects the natural resource base on which its livelihood...