Epstein, Graham

Over the last few decades, the diversity of governance solutions proposed by scientists and policymakers for addressing mounting environmental problems has increased substantially. The traditional trichotomy of state, market and community governance has been replaced by a new interest in hybrid regimes in recognition that no single governance mode possesses the capabilities to address all current environmental problems. This paper takes stock of experiences that combine community and market-based governance solutions, or as we call them community-based environmental markets (CBEMs), to address environmental issues in a variety of resource management contexts. We first propose a classification system based on the authority held by communities and the type of good being transacted to identify four general classes of CBEMs. These include communal resource markets, communal service markets, collective resource markets and collective service markets. We then illustrate the utility of this classification system with a review of studies from the water, forest, pastures, fishery, agriculture and wildlife conservation sectors. We conclude with some hypotheses regarding the relative effectiveness of different types of CBEMs with respect to a range of social and environmental objectives.

Successful management of natural resources is crucial, especially when these resources are shared among multiple stakeholders. However, understanding which key factors favors the sustainable management of resources is difficult. While the literature abounds of individual cases, synthesis of these empirical studies is often hampered by cost and time. Here we leverage current advances in natural language processing and large language models in order to analyze the relationship between Ostrom Institutional Design principles with conflict, inequality and the state of natural resources in over 2000 published articles. By assessing the importance of Ostrom institutional design principles (DPs), we propose blueprints for success for different contexts. Our results contribute to the literature in two important ways: 1) furthering the synthesis related to common pool resources facilitating the understanding of which institutional arrangements increase the likelihood of success in different contexts; 2) methodologically, increase our ability to synthesize the literature in order to provide actionable information to policy makers and practitioners.