The paper provides and tests empirically a conditional resource curse theory, postulating that the relative effectiveness of the contenders plays a crucial role in determining whether resources are a curse or a blessing.

The paper shows that unstructured lending from international credit markets can create incentives to loot the country; and an enhanced likelihood of looting causes greater political instability, and diminishes growth.

The paper gives guidance on the ways of reducing pollution in a township settlement.

The average levels of PM10 pollutants in Khayelitsha, a poor informal settlement near Cape Town in South Africa, are unusually high. The contributory factors are the burning of household waste, wood and used tyres; vehicular emissions; and dust. This paper gives guidance towards selecting interventions for reducing these pollutants.

The authors studied the potential trade-off between countries’ investments in mitigation versus adaptation to climate change. Mitigating greenhouse gases may be a public good, but adaptation to climate change is a private good, benefiting only the country or individual.

Climate change mitigation presents us with a social dilemma: while mitigation benefits everyone, individuals lack the incentive to alter their behaviour, since they can reap its benefits while failing to reduce their own emissions.

This paper explores whether any investment products or strategies in South Africa take environmental sustainability into account. By looking at how environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are used in investment decision making, we found that most socially responsible investment products and responsible investment strategies largely focus on infrastructure, development, and black economic empowerment.

Wetlands are commonly understood to have the capacity to reduce the loads of excess nutrients, pathogens, sediments, and other contaminants generated by various activities in their catchment areas. However, quantifying these “services” is difficult and most research in this field has concentrated on artificial treatment wetlands. Understanding the value of their water treatment characteristics, as well as the other services they provide, is increasingly recognized as essential to achieving a balance between conservation and activities that degrade or replace wetlands.

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.

Tourism development provides an important opportunity for reducing pressures on the delta’s natural resources as well as reducing people’s dependence on the these resources for their livelihoods.