Eco-certification of coffee, timber and other high-value agricultural commodities is increasingly widespread. In principle, it can improve commodity producers' environmental performance, even in countries where state regulation is weak. But eco-certification will have limited environmental...

The risk of losses of income and productive means due to adverse weather can differ significantly among farmers sharing a productive landscape, and is of course hard to estimate, or even “guesstimate” empirically. Moreover, the costs associated with investments in reduced vulnerability to...

Tourism associated with beaches, protected areas, and other natural resources often has serious environmental impacts. The problem is especially acute in developing countries, where nature-based tourism is increasingly important and environmental regulation is typically weak. Eco-certification...

Protected areas are a cornerstone of forest conservation in developing countries. Yet we know little about their effects on forest cover change or the socioeconomic status of local communities, and even less about the relationship between these effects. This paper assesses whether 'win-win'...

Because conventional command-and-control environmental regulation often performs poorly in developing countries, policymakers are increasingly experimenting with alternatives, including voluntary regulatory programs. Research in industrialized countries suggests that such programs are sometimes...

Most of the literature attributes credit constraints in small-farm developing-country agriculture to the variability of returns to investment in this sector. But the literature does not fully explain lenders' reluctance to finance investments in technologies that provide both higher average and...

Managed forest ecosystems like shade coffee supply valuable ecological services. Yet little is known about the drivers and characteristics of clearing in such systems. We present a spatial econometric analysis of land cover in a shade coffee region in southern Mexico. We find that plots close to...

Little is known about land cover change in agroforestry systems, which often supply valuable ecological services. We use a spatial regression model to analyze clearing in El Salvador’s shade coffee–growing regions during the 1990s. Our findings buttress previous research suggesting the...