According to proponents, voluntary agreements (VAs) negotiated with polluters sidestep weak institutions and other barriers to conventional environmental regulation in developing countries. Yet little is known about their effectiveness.

Much of the improvement in living standards in developed and developing countries alike is attributable to the exploitation of nonrenewable and renewable resources. The problem is to know when the exploitation occurs at rates and with technologies that are sustainable.

Humanity has emerged as a major force in the operation of the biosphere, with a significant imprint on the Earth System, challenging social–ecological resilience. This new situation calls for a fundamental shift in perspectives, world views, and institutions. Human development and progress must be reconnected to the capacity of the biosphere and essential ecosystem services to be sustained.

Social-ecological systems exhibit patterns across multiple levels along spatial, temporal, and functional scales. The outcomes that are produced in these systems result from complex, non-additive interactions between different types of social and biophysical components, some of which are common to many systems, and some of which are relatively unique to a particular system. These properties, along with the mostly non-experimental nature of the analysis, make it difficult to construct theories regarding the sustainability of social-ecological systems.

This report, 2011 Resources for the Future (RFF) Activities in Human Cooperation to Manage Natural Resources (COMMONS) program funded by the Swedish Research Council, Formas, contains an introductory section, and four sections reporting on use of funds by Allen Blackman, Dallas Burtraw, Alan Krupnick, and Juha Siikamaki.

In this paper, we analyze the effects of the choice of price (taxes) versus quantity (tradable permits) instruments on the policy response to technological change. We show that if policy responses incur transactional and political adjustment costs, environmental targets are less likely to be adjusted under tradable permits than under emission taxes. This implies that the total level of abatement over time might remain unchanged under tradable permits while it will increase under emission taxes.

Advocates claim that voluntary programs can help shore up poorly performing command-and-control environmental regulation in developing countries. Although literature on this issue is quite thin, research on voluntary environmental programs in industrialized countries suggests that they are sometimes ineffective because they mainly attract relatively clean plants free-riding on prior pollution control investments.

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.

This paper analyses the economic impacts of climate change on Ethiopia’s agriculture using a countrywide computable general equilibrium model.

Private sector initiatives certifying that producers of goods and services adhere to defined environmental process standards are increasingly popular worldwide. According to proponents, they can circumvent chronic barriers to effective public sector environmental regulation in developing countries.