Students will study how the effectiveness of different institutional responses to environmental problems is shaped by underlying legal rules, user characteristics, and resource characteristics. Current research related to environmental policy instruments will be examined across a variety of common-pool resources (e.g., groundwater, fisheries) to environmental externalities (e.g., air pollution, congestion).
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will work on a journal-length research paper and link concepts covered in the course to their own work. Depending on their position in the graduate program, their paper should be used as the basis for a grant proposal, a dissertation prospectus, or a dissertation chapter.
Athena Title
Env and Nat Resource Policy
Prerequisite
ECON 2106 or ECON 2106E or ECON 2106H or AAEC 2580 or AAEC 2580E or permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
Explain principles of sustainability, including the need for systems thinking, as well as the potential for and challenges of enabling sustainable resource use, adaptation, and social-ecological resilience.
Demonstrate the ability to rigorously analyze scientific research on environmental policy and politics, especially the institutional economics literature.
Apply the framework of new institutional economics to study how regulation, property rights, and social norms perform as mechanisms for aligning individual incentives with long-term, sustainable resource use.
Assess the strengths and weaknesses of particular policy frameworks and articulate these in writing.
Topical Outline
Introduction to New Institutional Economics
Sustainability as a Problem of Ownership and Responsibility
Some Basic Public Economics
Solutions to Collective Action Problems: Ideal Types
The Politics of Sustainability
Common-Pool Resource (CPR) Governance
Potential Pitfalls of CPR Governance
Property Rights Approaches
Potential Pitfalls of Property Rights
Global Environmental Challenges: Vulnerability, Adaptive Capacity, and Adaptation
