Governance

Program Coordinator:  Hua Wang

Regulation and Institution
Economics

Resource Persons
Documents

Regulation and Institution

This research is to better understand environmental governance in developing countries and to explore how environmental governance in developing countries can be improved. The major research questions include whether, how and why some environmental governance strategies, such as decentralization, pollution charge, performance disclosure and stakeholder dialogue, are working and why some are not. The research questions are analyzed, quantitatively where necessary, with case studies, surveys and pilot field tests. The preliminary findings include: information disclosure can be an effective strategy for almost all countries; stakeholder dialogue can be a feasible and effective approach; decentralization works with conditions; enforcement is affected by local conditions. Ukraine, Ghana, China and other southeast countries are currently under research.

Economics

The primary objective of this research is to improve methodologies for environmental welfare measurement and demand assessment that can be used for development projects in developing countries. Both the stated preference approaches such as the contingent valuation method and the revealed preference approaches such as the travel cost approach are being studied. Different value elicitation approaches and modeling strategies are tested and compared, and improved methodologies are recommended. Such research has been conducted in Armenia, Thailand, India and China. Air quality, water supply, urban solid wastes, water resources protection of lakes and rivers, and public health are the subjects under investigation.    

Resource Persons

Craig Meisner
Hua Wang
Susmita Dasgupta

Documents

Selected Recent Publications