The guarantees and the protection of human rights, in particular socio-economic rights are shifting more and more from the public sphere, from the Governmental, Supra-Governmental and Intergovernmental level, towards the private, where corporations and various other private entities are directly...

Agriculture uses more land and water than any other human activity, and our consumption demands continue to grow even as our resource base shrinks. A highly industrialized U.S. food system produces lots of food at seemingly low per unit cost. But our current system is taking a heavy toll on...

Globalization is a phenomenon of inherent complexity. As such, it is defined by a number of positive, as well as negative, traits. The seemingly inextricable links between countries - created by international trade and membership in a variety of international organizations - are seen as a...

The terms governing land investments can shape whether host countries and local communities benefit from investment projects. Yet host governments in low- and middle-income countries often lack sufficient legal and technical capacity to prepare for, negotiate, implement, and monitor investments,...

There has been great interest in recent decades in “ecosystem services”. One of the services most often mentioned is the retention of nutrients. I construct a simple model of agricultural land use under a regulatory requirement that nutrient loading cannot exceed a fixed ceiling develop...

China’s emerging standing in the world demands a major rethinking of its diplomatic strategies. Given its population size, geographical scale, economic power and military presence, China is poised to play a larger political role in the twenty-first century, and is thus perceived by the...

China’s emerging standing in the world demands a major rethinking of its diplomatic strategies. Given its population size, geographical scale, economic power and military presence, China is poised to play a larger political role in the twenty-first century, and is thus perceived by the...

This paper evaluates the effects of a public groundwater provision program on water tables in Northern India. I theorize that public provision leads to sustainable use of groundwater when the fixed costs for private well provision are high. I use village-level longitudinal data on aquifers and...

Wastewater management has been seen primarily as a technical and economic issue but it is now recognised that these are some of the elements in an array of other factors that affect sustainability of wastewater systems. Literature studies point out that municipal authorities have a general and...

We model and test the representativeness of environmental policy-making, as implied by cost-benefit analysis (CBA) results, in governmental agencies assuming that individual civil servants maximize their personal utility. Education may also influence civil servants’ behavior. The biologists in...