The voice and role of communities, particularly their capacity to organise and resist, has been understudied in the specialised literature on illicit crops and largely ignored in policy debates. Based on ongoing research in Colombia, this policy paper explores the capacity of communities to organise and resist – as a manifestation of cultural and social capital – in the context of illicit economies.

Payments for environmental services (PES) constitute a growing approach to achieve the sustainability of ecosystems and the benefits they provide to people. However, informal tenure and lack of capacity to enforce property rights impede implementation of PES initiatives. Such challenges are common for local communities in coastal and marine areas who overexploit Common-Pool Resources (CPR) under open access. Assigning property rights to organized users has been implemented as a solution, transforming a public good into a club good.

"Chapter 13: (Real) behavior meets (real) institutions: towards a research agenda on the study of the commons" in A Research Agenda for New Institutional Economics. Elgar Research Agendas. Edited by:Claude Ménard and Mary M. Shirley. 2018.

Abstract Chapter 13:

Protected areas (PAs) are a prominent approach to maintaining and enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services. A critical question for safeguarding these resources is how PA governance processes and management structures influence their effectiveness. We conduct an impact evaluation of 12 PAs in three Central American countries to assess how processes in management restrictions, management capacity, and decentralization affect the annual change in the satellite-derived Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).

Understanding unethical behavior is essential to many phenomena in the real world. We carry out a field experiment in a unique setting that varies the levels of reciprocity and guilt in an ethical decision. A survey more than one year before the field experiment allows us to compare at the individual level stated unethical behavior with revealed behavior in the same situation in the field. Our results indicate a strong discrepancy between stated and revealed behavior, regardless of the specific treatment in the field experiment.

In empirical studies, survey questions are typically used to measure trust; trust games are also used to measure interpersonal trust. In this paper, we measure trust in different institutions by using both trust games and survey questions. We find that generalized trust is only weakly correlated with trust in specific institutions, when elicited both by using a trust game and by using survey questions. However, the correlation between trust in a specific institution elicited through a trust game and stated trust for the same institution is stronger and statistically significant.

The intense debate on the effectiveness of the war on drugs contrasts with the scarce quantitative evidence on its impacts on drug cultivation decisions by individual producers. Using panel data from an original survey of farmers living in coca-growing areas in Colombia, we evaluate the effectiveness of forced eradication policies implemented between 2000 and 2005. We find that one additional hectare eradicated decreases coca supply by 0.44 hectares, indicating that coca can only be eradicated at a very high cost.