Increasingly, natural resource conservation programs refer to participation and local community involvement as one of the necessary prerequisites for sustainable resource management. In frameworks of adaptive comanagement, the theory of participatory conservation plays a central role in the democratization of decisionmaking authority and equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. We observ...

In our work we analyse the political disaffection or “the subjective feeling of powerlessness, cynicism, and lack of confidence in the political process, politicians, and democratic institutions, but with no questioning of the political regime” by exploiting Twitter data through machine learning techniques. In order to validate the quality of the time-series generated by the Twitter data, we hi...

This paper evaluates existing measures of political regimes and political freedom with respect to their desirability as indicators of political capabilities. It argues that the focus of desirable measures should be on the political and civil institutions that affect individuals’ opportunities to pursue their goals (their capabilities). Attempts to capture “actual” capabilities are misleading si...

As petroleum extraction and consumption has steadily increased in recent decades, economists and development researchers have been puzzled by discrepancies in the growth, development, and governance of oil-dependent countries around the world. The divergent development outcomes of oil states beg the following question: what are the political and economic conditions that determine the consequenc...

Despite decades of research on social capital, studies that explore the relationship between political institutions and generalized trust-a key element of social capital-across time are sparse. To address this issue, we use various cross-national public-opinion data sets including the World Values Survey and employ pooled time-series OLS regression and fixed- and random-effects estimation techn...

This article explores the kinds of institutional arrangements most likely to be able to address sustainability issues. The term “institutions” is taken to mean the wide array of social, political, legal, and economic arrangements, structures, and rules—not simply institutions of the state, but of community and society more broadly. Of particular interest here is the interconnection of people an...

This study, examines the roles of macroeconomic uncertainty, political risk, as well as host country institutions, in affecting FDI inflows into African economies. The past few decades have witnessed a surge of FDI inflows to developing regions. However, FDI inflows to Africa still remain small when compared to other developing regions. What characteristics does Africa exhibit that deter FDI in...

While philosophical speculation on the design of social, economic, and political institutions goes back at least to Plato (and perhaps further to Hammurabi), I will start this discussion at the end of the eighteenth century, in the radical and romantic response to the French Revolution. The nascent Industrial Revolution, the eclipse if not the collapse of the religious monopoly over discussion ...