Institutions, Sustainability, and Natural Resources

Name: Institutions, Sustainability, and Natural Resources | Institutions for Sustainable Forest Management
Brand: Springer
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Institutions for Sustainable Forest Management

Shashi Kant R. Albert Berry(Herausgeber*in)

Springer (Verlag)

1. Auflage

Erschienen am 17. Januar 2006

XVIII, 362 Seiten

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Sustainability, Institutions, and Forest Management.- Epilogue.- Institutions, Sustainable Forest Management, and Post-Newtonian Economics.- In Search of Optimal Institutions for Sustainable Forest Management: Lessons from Developed and Developing Countries.- Modern Economic Theory and the Challenge of Embedded Tenure Institutions: African Attempts to Reform Local Forest Policies.- Organizations, Institutions, External Setting and Institutional Dynamics.- Valuing Forest Ecosystems - An Institutional Perspective.- The Great Tragedy of Science: Sustainable Forest Management and Markets for Environmental Services.- The Kyoto Protocol: Property Rights and Efficiency of Markets.- Deforestation and Population Increase.- Limitations of Sustainable Forest Management: An Economics Perspective.- Sustainable Forestry in a World of Specialization and Trade.- Forest Carbon Sinks: A Temporary and Costly Alternative to Reducing Emissions for Climate Change Mitigation.- The International Trade and Environmental Regime and the Sustainable Management of Canadian Forests.- Sustainable Forest Management: Ciriacywantrup's Definition of Conservation in Today's Forest Resource Context.- Stakes, Suspicions and Synergies in Sustainable Forest Management-the Asian Experience.

2. AN OVERVIEW OF INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS (p.85-86)

Among economic analyses giving serious attention to institutions a distinction has emerged between the Old Institutional Economics (OIE) and the New Institutional Economics (NIE). The former, associated with authors such as Commons (1961), Ayres (1962), and Veblen (1975), is characterized by an holistic approach stressing the idea that individual behavior and phenomena cannot be explained without taking due account of the context. This perspective gives considerable emphasis to institutions relative to the activities and choices of individuals in the determination of economic outcomes (Setterfield, 1993). The NIE, associated with authors such as Coase (1960), Schotter (1981) and Williamson (1985), emphasises the importance of the self-interested behavior of individuals and posits that, during the evolution towards a market economy, institutions arise because they are valued by rational economic agents. Bromley (1989) argues that such positive valuation of institutions may be related not only to their contribution to allocative efficiency or to a desired redistribution of income but also to profit-seeking unproductive activities.

Both variants have been criticized for being unidirectional - the OIE for overlooking the impact of individual behavior on institutions, and the NIE for overlooking the impact of institutions on individuals' behavior. To overcome these shortcomings, Setterfield (1993) has suggested a model of institutional hysteresis characterized by the short-term exogeneity and long-term endogeneity of institutions. In the short-term, due to a degree of, it is the institutional setting which mainly guides economic activities. In the longer-run, however, institutional changes come about through pressures from the current patterns of economic activity-- pressures that are also usually counterbalanced to some extent by the forces of institutional inertia. In other words, long-run institutional changes are evolving, notnecessarily- optimal, path-dependent phenomena4, unlike the standard equilibrium metaphor of mainstream economic theory.

Another new variant of the theory of institutional change has recently been posited by North (1990), with foundations in the theory of technological change proposed earlier by David (1985) and Arthur (1988). David described a form of path-dependent technological change beginning with a set of accidental events, and identified strong technical inter-relatedness, scale economies, and irreversibilities due to learning and habituation as the main factors contributing to path dependency. Arthur (1988) linked path dependency to the increasing returns economy, which was seen as characterized also by multiple equilibria, and the related possibility of inefficiency and lock-in. He identified four generic sources of self-reinforcing mechanisms: large set-up or fixed costs; learning effects; coordination effects; and adaptive expectations. These concepts have been used to explain the choice of AC electricity (David and Bunn 1987), the selection of light-water nuclear reactors, and the gasoline engine (Arthur 1989), as well as the FORTRAN computer language and VHS videotape formats (Arthur 1991).

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