Targeted Global Constraint: Unsustainable Use of Degradable Resources
Constraints to Coordinated, Sustainable Use of Environmentally Sensitive Resources

Environmentally sensitive resources face two distinct, yet related challenges that confront their sustainable use. The first challenge comes from the fact that sustaining the productivity of degradable resources may require significant investment that may be impossible to meet or poses obstacles for future well-being. The second challenge results from the fact that one individual's use or misuse of the resource will directly affect another individual who depends on the same resource. BASIS research is designed to explore how policies that support improved markets and market access might also address these challenges and improve resource conservation.

When access to capital is weak, investment in resource-conserving projects comes at the cost of reduced current consumption. For households living near the margin of subsistence, this cost can be very high indeed. Mining the natural resources is a rational response by households in this circumstance, yet it also exacerbates the degradation of the natural resource base.

Innovating Institutions to Help Land Reform Beneficiaries explores the equity sharing institutional approach, which is designed to enhance financial market access of land reform beneficiaries. This project explores the degree to which this institutional innovation permits low wealth individuals to allocate and maintain their natural resource base in more sustainable ways.

Rural Markets, Natural Capital, and Dynamic Poverty Traps in East Africa explores the hypothesis that missing financial markets contribute to households being caught in a poverty trap where they may find they have little choice but to deplete soils and draw down the natural resource base in non-sustainable ways.

Where one individual's use or misuse of a resource directly affects other users, markets and local institutions of resource allocation may fail to adequately coordinate the interests of multiple users. One outcome of this is that the management of natural resources may become subject to institutional dissonance or incoherence.

Promoting Equitable Access to Water Resources works to understand the sources of institutional dissonance and to innovate alternative management institutions that can assure sustainability of the natural resource base while remaining faithful to democratic participation and inclusion.