This paper relates principle findings in the optimal economic enforcement literature to practical issues of enforcing and managing forest and wildlife access restrictions in developing countries.

The authors identified large gaps in the theoretical literature that limit its usefulness for practical management, particularly regarding limited funding and cost recovery, multiple layers of enforcement, different incentives faced by enforcers, and conflict between protected-area managers’ job requirements and rural people’s needs.

The authors explore the impact of participatory forest management (PFM) in Tanzania that excludes villagers from traditional access to forests to collect non-timber forest products (NTFPs).

Using fieldwork and a spatial-temporal model, they focused on forest degradation and regeneration and villagers’ utility before and after PFM has been introduced. Although the PFM forest improves, they found that a moratorium on NTFP collection often adversely affects villagers’ livelihoods and more distant, less-protected forests.

We evaluated the impacts of the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on rural households’ holdings of livestock and forest assets including trees, applying both regression analysis and propensity score matching to panel data.

Using South Africa’s hake and rock lobster fisheries, the authors argue the need for satellite accounts of South Africa’s commercial fisheries.

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.

Poor farmers need sustainable agriculture that relies on renewable local resources, such as conservation tillage and compost. This study looked at factors influencing decisions to adopt these two practices, using multinomial logit analysis of plot and household characteristics.

Economic policies that boost profits from agroforesty, thereby creating financial incentives for land managers to favor these systems over less environmentally friendly land uses, could, in theory, have ancillary environmental benefits. This paper analyzes primary and secondary data to determine whether a voluntary price support program for Mexican coffee-mostly grown in shaded systems that supply important ecosystem services- has had such "win-win" benefits by stemming land-use change in the coffee sector.

With decentralization experiments occurring in the Chinese forestry sector, the authors used a survey-based choice experiment to investigate farmers’ preferences for various property-rights attributes of a forestland contract.

Santiago was one of the first cities outside the OECD to implement a tradable permit program to control air pollution. This paper looks closely at the program’s performance over the past 10 years, stressing its similarities and discrepancies with trading programs in developed countries, and analyzing how it has reacted to regulatory adjustments and market shocks. Studying Santiago’s experience allows us to discuss the drawbacks and advantages of applying tradable permits in less developed countries.

The authors investigated the impact of soil and water conservation (SWC) investment on farm productivity in Kenya. They focused on plots with and without SWC, testing whether increased SWC is beneficial for yield and affects input levels, input returns, and crop characteristics.