RESUMEN: La economía del agua en España se encuentra en una fase de cambio institucional, cuyo desarrollo va a estar fuertemente condicionado por la estructura de los derechos de propiedad sobre el agua.

Resilience is the magnitude of disturbance that can be tolerated before a socioecological system (SES) moves to a different region of state space controlled by a different set of processes. Resilience has multiple levels of meaning: as a metaphor related to sustainability, as a property of dynamic models, and as a measurable quantity that can be assessed in field studies of SES. The operational indicators of resilience have, however, received little attention in the literature.

In Ethiopian development policies, pastoralist areas have recently attracted moreattention. However, much debate and policy advice is still based on assumptionsthat see a sedentary lifestyle as the desirable development outcome for pastoralistcommunities. This paper investigates current practices of collective action and howthese are affected by changing property rights in the pastoralist and agro–pastoralist economies of three selected sites in eastern Ethiopia.

This article examines the emergence of conflict and collaboration in the implementation of forest conservation policies in Soria, Spain. We draw insights from discursive institutionalism and use a comparative case study approach to analyse and compare a situation of social conflict over the Natural Park declaration in the Sierra de Urbión, and a civil society led collaborative process to develop management plans for the “Sierra de Cabrejas” in Soria.

Water marketing is often cited as a means of alleviating the stresses attached to allocation of water use. Frequently, marketing is suggested in a context that implies substitution of competitive markets for the allocation based on the prior appropriation doctrine. This study examines water marketing from the perspective of a transactions cost approach to the private and broad social agreements (contracts) that support water allocation. It examines the major behavioral challenges faced by any contract, and the alternative approaches to those challenges, with respect to water allocation.

The governments of countries that allow private land ownership have two main tools to motivate landowner behavior: regulations and incentives. This research examines landowner preferences toward these policy tools and asks specifically: Do private forest landowners in New Brunswick and Maine believe that regulations and/or incentives are effective means to motivate responsible stewardship? Can landowners identify explicit regulations and policies that restrict property rights?

Addressing global fisheries overexploitation requires better understanding of how small-scale fishing communities in developing countries limit access to fishing grounds. We analyze the performance of a system based on individual licenses and a common property-rights regime in their ability to generate incentives for self-governance and conservation of fishery resources. Using a qualitative before-after-control-impact approach, we compare two neighbouring fishing communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico.

Informed by debates in recent literature on indigenous peoples’ role in water governance, our research examines recent initiatives to enhance the role of Māori in water governance in Aotearoa/New Zealand based on the case of recently reinvented hybrid governance arrangements for Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere. The water governance landscape in New Zealand has been significantly reconfigured in the last 25 years, with wide-ranging changes precipitated by the neo-liberal agendas of recent governments.

Direct payments for the protection of biodiversity (a type of payment for environmental services) have been proposed as an effective tool for delivering conservation outcomes, in a way that also delivers development benefits to local people. Using an impact evaluation framework, this paper analyses the effectiveness of a direct payment program that was established for nine globally threatened bird species in the Northern Plains of Cambodia.

Natural resource management perceived as a search for institutions that can ensure simultaneous fulfilment of three goals: productivity (or efficiency), sustainability and equity. In this article, we study the implications of pursuing the goal of equity in the management of surface water resources for irrigation with a heuristic model incorporating a Leontief-type fixed production function. The analysis has been carried out in the backdrop of the Baliraja water distribution experiment in India.

Today, the international community faces two major development challenges: how to ignite growth and how to establish democracy. Economic research has identified two plausible hypotheses regarding this association. The first hypothesis emphasizes the need to start with democracy and institutions that secure property rights. The second hypothesis emphasizes the need to start with physical and human capital accumulation.

This article examines how property rights expectations affect resource management incentives. It utilizes expected property rights over different timespans and of different strengths, corresponding to (a) investments of different intensities and (b) farmers' sense of security regarding their often de facto property rights. The results suggest that property rights and their alienability in ten-year time matter to intensive infrastructural investments, although not to lighter investments.