Political Economy Forum – serie

The Politics and Economics of Park Management examines national protected area systems, in both developed and developing countries, that have made a transformation from "fortress parks" to a sustainable use model. The contributors—park management, academics, and members of nongovenmental organizations—contend that successful institutional change in protected area systems involves not only the adoption of appropriate legal and regulatory regimes covering sustainable use, but also the development of an informal culture of sustainable resource use among all of a park's stakeholders. While this latter requirement is often difficult to achieve, the contributors show how these informal attitudes may evolve over time, both within the management structure of a park agency and the community of resource users. The case studies cited represent examples of successful institutional change, demonstrating both financial and conservation benefits to protected area agencies, that should serve as model for managing parks today.

The Technology of Property Rights combines the understanding of institutions and institutional change with a discussion of the latest technologies and their influence on the measurement and monitoring of property rights. The contributors analyze specific applications for fisheries, whales, water quality, various pollutants, as well as other pressing environmental issues. No other work brings together an economic understanding of environmental issues with technological expertise in the way this volume does.

One of the leading experts on public lands and land rights issues, Robert H. Nelson here brings together a collection of his finest essays. Nelson demonstrates that the 'progressive' goal of achieving scientific management of public lands has not been realized; instead, public land management has been dominated by interest group politics and ideology.

The past several decades have witnessed a growing recognition that environmental concerns are essentially property rights issues. Despite agreement that an absence of well-defined and consistently enforced property rights results in the exploitation of air, water, and other natural resources, there is still widespread disagreement about many aspects of America's property rights paradigm. The prominent contributors to Who Owns the Environment? explore numerous theoretical and empirical possibilities for remedying these problems. An important book for environmental economists and those interested in environmental policy.

Since 1970, when the Clean Air Act was passed and the Environmental Protection Agency was created, the primary means for addressing environmental problems in the U.S. has been through comprehensive federal statutes and detailed regulations. Evaluating almost three decades of experience with the Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other major federal environmental statutes, the contributors to this volume question the effectiveness and impact of the legal regime that created these regulations.While most studies of environmental policy paint a picture of improvement through government initiatives, these essays argue the contrary. Pointing to Cleveland's burning river, the death of Lake Erie, smog in Los Angeles, and Love Canal, the contributors demonstrate that command-and-control regulation of the environment has not delivered the great improvements in environmental quality as promised. The Common Law and the Environment offers principles for a new approach to protecting the environment and looks to evidence of the successes of alternative legal systems to address significant problems.

This book examines the development of property rights in marine fisheries, and asks whether the obstacles to their continued development cannot be more easily overcome. The contributed chapters generally focus on the consequences of a lack of property rights of commercial and small-time fishers globally. National governments have recognized that the absence of such rights coupled with the technological advances in commerical fishing have resulted in widespread economic and environmental problems (e.g., overfishing, bycatching, highgrading, increased physical dangers, and lower profits). The most significant solution to these problems, and the predominate concern of this book, is the institution of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), also known as Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs). These are national and global policies, public- and private-sector managed allocations of the amount of various species of fish, at certain qualities can be harvested at particular times by fishers.

Since the writings of Adam Smith, economists have understood the important role that private property rights play in a well functioning economic system. Without well-defined, enforced, and transferable property rights, the tragedy of the commons is said to result as in the classic case of over-fishing and over-grazing. This book challenges this narrow view of property rights by examining the role of informal constraints imposed by customs and culture. Recognizing that a great deal of human interaction takes place in the absence of individually specified rights, the authors challenge the notion that tragedy is inevitable within the commons.

In the American West, trappers, miners, and farmers often preceded the formal institutions of government and therefore had to invent their own institutional framework. Early historians like Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb found heroes in this romantic frontier. Modern historians, however, are challenging the traditional histories, arguing that the history of the West is one of natural resource waste, minority exploitation, and political manipulation by a powerful elite. This book challenges many conclusions from both schools in a framework that considers Western history as an episode in the evolution of property rights. The authors in this volume provide a new way of thinking about the West that relies neither on heroes nor villains but argues that economics and politics shaped the institutional environment of the American West.

One of the leading experts on public lands and land rights issues, Robert H. Nelson here brings together a collection of his finest essays. Nelson demonstrates that the 'progressive' goal of achieving scientific management of public lands has not been realized; instead, public land management has been dominated by interest group politics and ideology.

This collection of new and classic essays by a group of distinguished economists and wildlife experts challenges the prevailing idea that wildlife and markets are inimical to one another, arguing that markets can play an important role in preserving animal species and their habitat. In fact, the editors argue, the late nineteenth-century slaughter of wild game occurred because common ownership gave no incentive for hunters to limit their take or for owners of habitat to invest in wildlife. Using case studies from North America and southern Africa, the essays discuss how 'enviro-capitalism' has been successfully implemented to encourage elephant and rhino preservation and look at the politics of the international ivory ban. They examine the historical role of incentive wildlife management and the problems with political wildlife management that do not take into account the ownership of habitat.