In forests managed by participatory management in Tanzania, “volunteer” patrollers often enforce access restrictions, receiving a share of collected fine revenue as incentive. The authors explore how shared revenue and alternative sources of forest products for villagers determine the patrollers’ enforcement effort and decision to take bribes rather than report violators.

There is growing interest in understanding whether behavior is the same across locations. By holding cross- and within-country dimensions constant (in contrast to previous studies on cross-group comparisons of conditional cooperation), the authors investigated cooperative behavior between social groups in the same location. Their results reveal significantly different cooperation behavior, suggesting that different social groups exhibit differences both in terms of composition of types and extent of conditional cooperation.

The Kakamega Forest is the only remaining tropical rainforest fragment in Western Kenya and hosts large numbers of endemic animal and plant species. Protected areas were established decades ago in order to preserve the forest's unique biodiversity from being converted into agricultural land by the regions large number of small-scale farmers. Nonetheless, recent research shows that degradation continues at alarming rates.

We analyze roles of tenure insecurity and household endowments in explaining tree growing in Ethiopia, where farmers cannot sell or mortgage land and factor markets are imperfect.

This study will review the past studies of the cost of land degradation in Ethiopia, assess the major methodological and conceptual issues and problems existing in the different approaches, compare the findings across these studies considering the relative merits of the different approaches, and draw implications for policies and programs, as well as for future research related to land management in Ethiopia.

One of the most pressing problems faced by the Tunisian farmers and authorities is the inexorable decline of the water table over the past twenty years due to the over-exploitation of the groundwater. This study is an attempt to find how this issue can be resolved through collective action.

By making use of national historical data and statistical analysis, this paper argues that community-based wildlife conservation is a feasible hedge asset for agricultural production in rural Zimbabwe.

While many factors might affect biodiversity conservation, the use of economic incentives is argued to be potentially one of the most effective mechanisms for mainstreaming biodiversityconservation in bioregions. Institutions are singled out as one important class of socio-economic arrangements directly associated with economic incentives.

Using a difference-in-difference approach, this paper assesses the effects on investment of a low-cost land registration program in Ethiopia, which covered some 20 million plots over five years. Despite policy constraints, the program increased land-related investment and yielded benefits significantly above the cost of implementation.