Where joint forest management has been introduced into Tanzania, ‘volunteer’ patrollers take responsibility for enforcing restrictions over the harvesting of forest resources, often receiving as an incentive a share of the collected fine revenue. Using an optimal enforcement model, we explore how that share, and whether villagers have alternative sources of forest products, determines the effort patrollers put into enforcement and whether they choose to take a bribe rather than honestly reporting the illegal collection of forest resources. Without funds for paying and monitoring patrollers, policy makers face tradeoffs over illegal extraction, forest protection and revenue generation through fine collection.

Land is an essential factor of production. Institutions that govern its efficient use determine the sustainability of this essential resource. In Ethiopia all land is publicly owned. Such an institutional setting is said to have resulted in the major degradation of Ethiopia's land resources and dissipation of the resource rent. An alternative to this is assigning a private property institution. In this paper, we examine the consumer welfare effects of a change in the institutional setting on communal forest and grazing lands, using a cross-section data set of 200 households in Northern Ethiopia. Findings suggest that changing the current institutional setting could indeed be welfare reducing.

Self-governance of natural resources has started to gain increasing attention as an alternative to command-and-control and market-based tools. However, a fundamental question remains: is self-governance economically beneficial, allowing it to serve as an alternative management tool? This paper uses a unique set of survey data from a territorial-user-right-based South Korean inshore (maul) fishery and applies an empirical strategy to provide some of the first quantitative evidence that self-governance benefits maul fishermen. We find that members of the self-governance group perceive the management system as having had a positive impact on four out of the eight criteria we tested: stock recovery, curtailed fishing effort, reduced disputes among fishermen and declining incidents of illegal fishing. Considering that these groups have been in existence on average for less than seven years, these results indicate that the management scheme has made good progress overall.

This article formulates an empirical model that measures the short- and long-run effects of political stability, corruption control and economic growth on CO2 emissions from deforestation. Political stability and corruption have significant effects on forest cover in the short run and have lingering long-run effects. We derive a U-shaped forest–income curve where forest cover initially declines as per capita income increases, but starts to rise after an income turning point. Political stability and corruption control do not significantly affect the income turning point but both variables shift the forest–income curve up or down. The resulting CO2 emission–income curve is downward sloping and is based on changes in the levels of variables affecting forest cover. Increased political stability flattens the CO2 emissions–income curve, leading to smaller changes of CO2 emissions per unit change in income.

We analyze non-cooperative environmental policy when the only strategic interaction between countries is through bilateral transboundary pollution, i.e., countries are closed or small open economies. Under simultaneous moves, there is no carbon leakage. However, in the sequential-move game, carbon leakage occurs; the leader sets its pollution tax lower than that in the simultaneous-move game and lower than the marginal damage from own pollution, while the follower sets its tax higher than that in the simultaneous-move game. The only motive behind the leader's underregulation of own pollution is to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution from the follower. If pollution is a pure global public bad, aggregate pollution is higher in the sequential-move game than in the simultaneous-move game. The leader (follower) obtains higher (lower) welfare than that under simultaneous moves. Hence, if countries can choose to be leaders or followers, they choose to move first to set environmental taxes.

Choice models and a referendum format contingent valuation survey are used to investigate household preferences for improved water services and decentralization levels (actual departmental administration vs. further decentralization to the municipality) in urban Matiguás, Nicaragua. Choice models suggest that households prefer the current departmental administration over municipal provision for service and capacity, but believe that the municipality would be more interested in improving services. Results also indicate that households are willing to pay an increment of at least 112 per cent above their current monthly water bill for reliable and safe drinking water services, regardless of administration type.