"The central challenge of tropical biodiversity conservation involves reconciling private and social incentives to 'internalize' externalities. Positive externalities of natural resource conservation accrue at the local, national and global levels, although the costs of conservation are...

"Many of what we consider to be valuable natural assets existed for millennia without our ever being aware of their usefulness or value. For example, the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb pollution has only become useful to us in recent decades as the limits of that environmental service have...

"Two important decisions in designing markets for tradable emissions permits are whether to allow banking and whether to allow trading in entitlements to future permits. Banking is predicted to reduce price instability when firms trade in a reconciliation market after the quantity of emissions...

"In many fields, policymakers seem to have an increasing preference for simple, large, non- redundant systems of analysis and governance. To address this question, we examine several arenas in which scholars have studied the costs and benefits of different levels of redundancy, including:...

Published as Feeny, David, "Sub-Optimality and Transaction Costs on the Commons," in Edna Tusak Loehman and D. Marc Kilgour (eds.), Designing Institutions for Environmental and Resource Management (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 124-141. "Much of the literature on the...

"Financial mechanisms to secure rational use of Common Pool Resources (CPRs) are rarely addressed. While implementation plans and Governance structures remain difficult issues, funds and incentives may be needed to achieve measures agreed upon in international conventions. "Resources and...

"One of the new institutional forms of coping with the problem of rationing access to the commons involves the use of tradable permits. Applications of this approach have spread to many different types of resources and many different countries. The most common applications involve the control of...

"The paper outlines conditions under which decentralized approaches are likely to succeed in solving collective action problems. Criteria that render successful decentralized collective action more likely have mainly been developed in the Common Pool Resource (CPR) and International Relations...

"The determinants of local organizational density and the impacts of local and external organizations on collective and private natural resource management decisions are investigated based on a survey of 48 villages in central Honduras. Factors positively associated with local organizational...

"In 1968, Hardin argued that all commonly-owned resources would tragically be depleted unless private ownership was granted. There are many case studies which prove Hardin wrong. Common-pool resources have been managed with success. However, this success does not imply (as some believe) that...