The notion of common good is not clearly defined. Globalisation as well as sustainable development refers to it. This paper recalls four main objections to globalisation, namely institutional contextualisation, experience from economic history, equity issues, and other normative assessments. It...

The purpose of this article is to test whether the monetary valuation of environmental assets is sufficient to define a sustainable management of natural resources. This discussion is based on a one-year field experience in East Cameroon, one of the aims of which was to question the validity of...

It is possible today, to construct a house of comparable cost to a conventional one that will gain all of its energy from renewable energy sources. However, there are very few examples of such houses. This paper argues that the slow take up of these ideas has a parallel with the development and...

This paper discusses a key aspect of a sustainable pharmaceutical use of biodiversity: the increased demand of the pharmaceutical industry for biogenetic resources does not result in an increase of the market value of biodiversity. The increasing interest in biogenetic resources by the...

Six years after the UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development, an effort to give a new boost to its implementation in the field of science was made during the Sixth Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD6, held in New York in April 1998). This paper recalls the context...

Sustainable development, on a local level, requires incentives whose comprehension and identification depend on various stakes and the involvement of socio-economic actors. The complexity of the task could not be compounded without the aid of modern decision-methods such as Multi-Criteria...

(WP 01/03 Clave pdf) This paper aims to show how the process of diffusion of "clean technologies" confronts a variety of forces at the macro level that create systematic, technological and institutional barriers to their adoption. There is abundant literature on the role of technology transfer...

We analyze the efficiency of urbanization patterns in a dynamic model of endogenous urban growth with two sectors of production. Production exhibits increasing returns to scale on aggregate. Urban environmental pollution, as a force that discourages agglomeration, is caused by domestic...

The decision-making process concerning the co-incineration of industrial dangerous waste in Portugal has most certainly been transformed into a conflict centered on the unequal distribution of risks to the environment and to public health, opposing local population to the government. It is also...