Initiatives certifying that producers of goods and services adhere to defined environmental and social-welfare production standards are increasingly popular. According to proponents, these initiatives create financial incentives for producers to improve their environmental, social, and economic performance. We reviewed the evidence on whether these initiatives have such benefits.

Global efforts to reduce tropical deforestation rely heavily on the establishment of protected areas. Measuring the effectiveness of these areas is difficult because the amount of deforestation that would have occurred in the absence of legal protection cannot be directly observed. Conventional methods of evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas can be biased because protection is not randomly assigned and because protection can induce deforestation spillovers (displacement) to neighboring forests.

To support conservation planning, we ask whether a park's impact on deforestation rates varies with observable land characteristics that planners could use to prioritize sites. Using matching methods to address bias from non-random location, we find deforestation impacts vary greatly due to park lands' characteristics. Avoided deforestation is greater if parks are closer to the capital city, in sites closer to national roads, and on lower slopes.

Decentralization experiments are currently underway in the Chinese forestry sector. However, researchers and policy makers tend to ignore a key question: what do forest farmers really want from reform?

Land is an essential factor of production. Institutions that govern its efficient use determine the sustainability of this essential resource. In Ethiopia all land is publicly owned. Such an institutional setting is said to have resulted in major degradation of Ethiopia’s land resources and dissipation of the resource rent. An alternative to this is assigning private property institution.

The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility has recently proposed the application of strategic environmental social assessment (SESA) for incorporating environmental and social considerations in the preparation of REDD+ initiatives. This paper discusses the potential contribution of SESA to REDD+ initiatives drawing on experiences from earlier attempts to large scale forestry sector reforms and a recent World Bank pilot program on strategic environmental assessment.

This paper extends the basic model of Fausmann, and theoretically analyzes how forest tenure reform, tax reform, and market development affect timber supply.

This paper describes how management and information failures can retard transitions from the traditional use of biomass fuel by low income rural consumers and micro-producers.