Institutions and the Environment

Edited by Daniel W. Bromley, Anderson-Bascom Professor of Applied Economics (Emeritus), University of Wisconsin-Madison, US and Visiting Professor, Humboldt University-Berlin, Germany

This volume contains the definitive contributions to the institutional foundations of environmental issues. It covers the foundations of welfare economics, externalities, market failure, and the central nexus of law and economics. Each contribution illustrates the fundamental importance of institutions – the legal scaffolding of an economy – to environmental problems. This understanding of the institutions of an economy then leads into extensive coverage of how to diagnose environmental problems and then to formulate policy solutions to deforestation, degraded fisheries and pastoral regimes, pollution, land-use conflicts, contested property rights, the tragedy of open-access natural resources and general development problems in sub-Saharan Africa.