Mainstream economics has a tight grip on public discourse, yet it remains ill-equipped to comprehend the collaborative vision for managing environmental and resource commons, whereby stakeholders work cooperatively in implementing solutions, or to analyse the complex institutional choices arising from its pursuit. This ground-breaking book diagnoses the weaknesses of mainstream economics in analysing collaborative and other decentralized approaches to environmental management, and presents an alternative approach capable of identifying the conditions under which pursuit of the collaborative vision has a reasonable prospect of promoting voluntary cooperation in management of the commons. The result is a powerful and useful approach to economics for collaborative environmental management of the commons.
Part I: The Collaborative Vision; Progress, Sustainability and Economics; Part II: Theory and Method for an Economics of Collaborative Environmental Management; The View from Mainstream Economics; Developments in Collective Action Theory for Commons Management; An Economics for Collaborative Environmental Management (CEM); Part III: Lessons from the Field; Challenges and Strategies for CEM: Insights from International Experience; From Antagonism to Trust: Australia's Murray Darling Basin; Part IV: Grounding the Collaborative Vision; Rethinking Policy, Practice and Research; Myth, Enlightenment and Economics; Bibliography, Index
Graham Marshall is Programme Leader, Institute for Rural Futures, University of New England, Australia
Marshall has re-grafted economics to the philosophical roots of collaborative environmental management, given stakeholders a pragmatic economics for 'bottom-up' conflict resolution and eliminated the need for 'top-down' economic experts. Beautifully reasoned and wonderfully practical!--Richard B. Norgaard, Energy and Resources Program, University of California, Berkeley, US "If the potential of collaborative management is ever realized, it will owe a debt to this book. It provides a foundational economic theory of learning coming from complex adaptive systems thinking tested with field experience"-- Allan Schmid, University Distinguished Professor, Agricultural Economics Department, Michigan State University, US