This paper focuses on contract design to improve the incentive structure of current coordination mechanisms related to sustainable land use management in the Ethiopian highlands. The main objective is to assess whether, and if so under which terms and conditions, rural households are willing to...

Decentralization of irrigation management to local communities is often claimed to improve performance. The argument is that decentralization enhances the perceived legitimacy of irrigation management, which in turn increases the willingness of water users to cooperate and contribute to...

Decentralization of irrigation management is claimed to improve performance by enhancing legitimacy and, thus, increasing cooperation. We test this hypothesis by collecting information about water users’ legitimacy perceptions and assessing the impact of these perceptions on irrigation charge...

We study label framing effects in linear public goods games. By accounting for heterogeneous frame connotation, we can identify individual framing effects. We test for such effects in a field experiment on irrigation management in India. Using membership of the water users association as a proxy...

A popular alternative to state-led resource management is community resource management. This decentralised approach is potentially more efficient, but is not necessarily stable. We study this issue using coalition theory, arguing that some of the conditions for effective community resource...

In this paper we assess how perceptions of park legitimacy influence individual willingness to self-restrict their resource use — an important issue when designing conservation approaches like community ecosystem payments where the existing institutional context influences the willingness to...

One of the drivers of green consumerism are social network externalities that are associated with buying 'green' because green consumerism is fashionable, or because of reputation effects. We analyze how the strength of this social network effect impacts green consumerism, environmental...

Water-related investment projects affect downstream water availability, and therefore should account for these externalities. Few projects do, however, owing to lack of awareness, lack of data and difficulty in linking upstream investments to downstream effects. This article assesses the...

Watershed conservation is widely recognized as a major strategy for rural development throughout the developing world. In India, the apparent success of participatory approaches to watershed development resulted in a decentralization of project planning, implementation, and management to local...

Social capital is one of the main determinants of community resource management success. We use the (average) amount sent in a trust game as a measure of social capital in five rural villages in India. Combining these experimental data with household surveys we analyze: (i) how the amount sent...