Conflicts and Cooperation in Managing Environmental Resources (Microeconomic Studies)

The use of environmental resources involves strategic behaviour of self-interested agents, bargaining, cooperation and other efforts to provoke or settle conflicts. This book contains ten parts: the first six investigate conceptual issues of international conflicts and cooperation while the other four address conflicts and cooperation arising in the context of monitoring and enforcing environmental controls. The emphasis is on demonstrating how new developments in economic (game) theory can fruitfully be applied to important environmental issues. Descriptive as well as normative approaches are presented. In the context of international environmental problems attention is focused on the consequences of non-cooperative behaviour and on the incentives for, and barriers to, the emergence of cooperation. Incomplete implementation of environmental controls can be attributed, to some extent, to failures of monitoring and enforcement, which raises the issue of designing institutional arrangements for enforcement. This book shows students and researchers with a working knowledge of economic theory how complex issues of economic-environmental interaction are successfully tackled by advanced methods.