In 1992, governments gathered for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. The “Rio Declaration” laid out several principles of sustainable development, including the central role of policy instruments. This article takes stock of where we stand today in implementing sound and effective environmental policy instruments throughout the world, particularly in developing and transitional economies. It agures that, as our experience with market-based environmental policies has deepened over the past two decades, so has the ability to adapt instruments to complicated and heterogeneous contexts—but we are only just beginning, and the need to be further along is dire. One key factor may be that economists have not yet meaningfully accounted for the importance of political feasibility, which often hinges on risks to competitiveness and employment, or on the distribution of costs rather than on considerations of pure efficiency alone.
This report evaluates the progress achieved in forest management by indigenous people and local communities, which was set as a key objective at the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Because the effectiveness of payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs depends on landowners’ engagement, understanding the relationship between the type of payment and participation is a key issue.
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that gasoline taxation, an important and much-debated instrument of climate policy, has a disproportionately detrimental effect on poor people.