Abstract: Harrington (J Public Econ 37: 29-53, 1988) shows that a suitable strategy for regulators to make enforcement more efficient is to target surveillance resources according to past compliance records. Such scheme generates enforcement leverage as non-compliance triggers greater future scrutiny increasing the expected costs of non-compliance beyond the avoidance of immediate fines.
African wildlife conservation has been transformed, shifting from a traditional, state-managed
government approach to a broader governance approach with a wide range of actors designing and
implementing wildlife policy. The most widely popularized approach has been that of community managed
nature conservancies. The knowledge of how institutions function in relation to humans
and their use of the environment is critical to the design and implementation of effective conservation.
Extant literature on Joint Forest Management (JFM) impact evaluation has concluded that it generally does not provide sufficient incentives to justify the costs that forest use restrictions impose on local people. However, there is a dearth of evidence concerning whether alternative JFM intervention with improved market linkages for non-timber forest products has similar implications.
Zimbabwe’s community-based conservation model, which brings together peasant farmers in a tourism-focused approach to wildlife management, has not reduced the community’s poaching pressure on wildlife stocks in the protected area of Gonarezhou National Park (GNP) as much as intended.
The Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve is a 100 km long coastal stretch of towering mountains and craggy beaches about an hour’s drive east of Cape Town. The dramatic landscape, rare botanical diversity and ocean ‘playground’ are big drawcards for tourists, and contribute to property values. A recent study of the ‘amenity’ value of this stretch of coastline shows that many local visitors regard it as more desirable to visit than other stretches of South African coastline, and many are return visitors. Homeowners are willing to pay a premium for properties with sea views or access.
Extant literature on Joint Forest Management (JFM) impact evaluation has concluded that it generally does not provide sufficient incentives to justify the costs that forest use restrictions impose on local people. However, there is a dearth of evidence concerning whether alternative JFM intervention with improved market linkages for non-timber forest products has similar implications. In this study, we evaluated the income and distributive effects of a JFM program in Ethiopia in which additional support was provided for improved market linkages for non-timber forest products (NTFPs).
When poor rural families in Zimbabwe are able to collect bushmeat, it may allow them to increase their household income through selling the meat within their communities. This means that, if policies help support communities’ access to wildlife, they can address poverty and decrease income inequality in these areas.
This is the finding of Herbert Ntuli, a research fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Environmental Policy Research Unit (EPRU). The EPRU is the South African centre of the Environment for Development (EfD) initiative.
REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) is a form of payment for ecosystem services (a voluntary transaction in which a buyer makes a payment to a seller conditional on the ecosystem providing some service, such as carbon storage) aimed at decreasing carbon emissions from conversion of forest to farm land and unsustainable harvesting of forest resources in lower-income countries.
We estimate the effects on deforestation that have resulted from policy interactions between parks and payments and between park buffers and payments in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2005. We show that the characteristics of the areas where protected and unprotected lands are located differ significantly. Additionally, we find that land characteristics of each of the policies and of the places where they interact also differ significantly. To adequately estimate the effects of the policies and their interactions, we use matching methods.
According to advocates, eco-certification can stem environmental damages from tourism in developing countries. Yet we know little about tourism operators’ economic incentives to get certified. To help fill that gap, we use detailed panel data to analyze the Blue Flag beach certification program in Costa Rica where nature-based tourism has caused significant environmental damage. We use new hotel investment to proxy for private benefits, and fixed effects and propensity score matching to control for self-selection bias.