Weak environmental regulatory institutions in developing countries often undermine conventional command-and-control pollution control policies. As a result, these countries are increasingly experimenting with alternative approaches aimed at leveraging nonregulatory “green” pressures applied by local communities, capital markets, and consumers.

Scholars have suggested that in China centralized environmental policymaking may be decoupled from idiosyncratic local implementation, and thus have questioned the outcomes. This paper fills a gap in the literature on China’s environmental governance by assessing the effects of the centralized regime on outcomes and diagnosing institutional deficiencies along the following three dimensions: structure, penetration to multiple actors in society, and persistence in efforts taken.

National government-funded payments for environmental services (PES) programs often lack sustainable financing and fail to target payments to providers of important environmental services. In principle, these problems can be mitigated by supplementing government financing with contributions from leading environmental service users.

This paper investigates the use of charges and standards in dealing with a common externality, plastic litter from shopping bags in Botswana. The country passed a plastic bag tax (effective 2007) to curb the plastic bag demand. Interestingly, the legislation did not force retailers to charge for plastic bags, which they did voluntarily at different prices.

In previous research, a systematic analytic-deliberative process for public participation in risk ranking was introduced and successfully tested with participants from the United States using heath, safety, and environmental risks.

Ethiopia is one of the sub-Saharan countries of Africa which liberalized their economies and developed poverty reduction strategies that underpin market-led strategies for broad-based agricultural development and economic growth. The country has successively adopted economic reform programs that aimed to open up the agricultural marketing system for active participation of the private sector.

In developing countries, weak environmental regulatory institutions often undermine conventional command-and-control policies. As a result, these countries are increasingly experimenting with alternative approaches that aim to leverage nonregulatory “green” pressures applied by local communities, capital markets, and consumers. This article reviews three strands of the empirical literature on this trend.

National government-funded payments for environmental services (PES) programs often lack sustainable financing and fail to target payments to providers of important environmental services. In principle, these problems could be mitigated by replacing at least some government funding with direct contributions from individual environmental service users who have incentives to underwrite payments and who can ensure that they are targeted appropriately.

The Costa Rican Regulatory Authority (ARESEP) seeks a new methodology to set the prices of electric power generation that uses renewable and alternative sources of energy.

We conducted a study to internalize the environmental externalities and other economic benefits for reducing adverse effects on the environment when using other types of energy sources like fossil fuel.

This analysis of the fishers’ compliance with regulations in Lake Victoria, Tanzania, gives support to the traditional economics-of-crime model and shows that the extension of the basic deterrence model can lead to a richer model with substantially higher explanatory power.