We argue that economics – as the scientific method of analyzing trade-offs – can be helpful (and may even be indispensable) for assessing the trade-off between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the “opportunity set” of politics with respect...

We study how human preferences affect the resilience of economies that depend on more than one type of natural resources. In particular, we analyze whether the degree of substitutability of natural resources in consumer needs may give rise to multiple steady states and path dependence even when...

We develop and formalize a utilitarian notion of responsibility for sustainability which is inspired by Singer‟s (1972) principle and the Brundtland Commission‟s notion of sustainability (WCED 1987). We relate this notion of responsibility to established criteria for the assessment of...

We empirically study personal norms of sustainability, conceptualized according to the norm-activation theory and operationalized under the notion of strong ecological-economic sustainability, for commercial cattle farmers in semi-arid rangelands of Namibia, a system that is subject to extensive...

We study risk preferences and their determinants for commercial cattle farmers in Namibia who are subject to high precipitation risk that is heterogeneous across farms. We use data on risk preferences from questionnaire and field experiments, simulated data for on-farm precipitation risk and...