As this comprehensive Companion demonstrates, social economics is a dynamic and growing field that emphasizes the key role that values play in the economy and in economic life. Social economics treats the economy and economics as being embedded in the larger web of social and ethical...

In this essay we argue that the key barriers to interdisciplinary work between economists and anthropologists are differences of methodology and epistemology--in what the two disciplines consider important to explain and how they evaluate the criteria for a good explanation. The essay is an...

Mathematical programming models of “representative” farms are commonly used to evaluate policies such as input subsidies and output price supports. On canals in India, upstream farmers routinely use more irrigation water than allotted. In such circumstances, the programming model should...

This paper reviews the achievements of Middle East environmental diplomacy under the multilateral track and lays out a feasible program to build on these achievements. It argues that negotiations should be informed by three lessons from the history of international water diplomacy. These are: 1)...

Summary Equity is central to community-based development efforts, but community perspectives on equity are seldom examined in the development literature. This study investigates how equity in a rainwater harvesting program is understood, and practiced in two Rajasthani communities. Drawing on...

Summary This paper examines public-private partnerships (PPPs) for development through the example of telecenters in two Indian states. How might a developmental state position itself with respect to civil society under a PPP model of service delivery? We find that each state's political economy...

The premise of this article is that outcomes of economic models and process analyses of anthropology are both essential for understanding social phenomena, including those surrounding the commons. An explanation of any model outcome is invariably about process and structure--the outcomes of...

In this paper we focus on a few broad analytical themes that have not been paid enough attention in the theoretical institutional economics literature: in particular, (a) the process of persistence of dysfunctional institutions in poor countries, (b) institutional impediments as strategic...

This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. Theoretical predictions of a model of household division and land transactions...