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This volume emphasizes instead the notion of 'good fit,' taking the position that welfare-promoting policies, institutions, and governance must be tailored, at least in part, to a country's specific context. In this vein, the volume presents an analytical framework for assessing a country's political economy and institutional environment as it relates to natural resource management and, on that basis, it offers a substantial set of targeted prescriptions across the natural resource value chain that are technically sound and compatible with the identified underlying incentives. In other words, the objective of this book is to help development practitioners unravel the political economy dynamics surrounding natural resource management in order to complement their technically grounded engagement. To this end, the analytical approach has been two-pronged. First, case studies were conducted on the political economy of the hydrocarbon and mineral value chains in 13 countries in the Africa, East Asia and Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean regions. Second, in light of this empirical material, the book highlights the current frontier of applied political economy analysis on resource dependence. This volume synthesizes the empirical and the theoretical with an emphasis on illuminating the implications for operational engagement in resource-dependent settings.

This volume focuses on the political economy surrounding the detailed decisions that governments make at each step of the value chain for natural resource management. From the perspective of public interest or good governance, many resource-dependent developing countries pursue apparently short-sighted and sub-optimal policies in relation to the extraction and capture of resource rents, and to spending and savings from their resource endowments. This work contextualizes these micro-level choices and outcomes.

At present, inland fisheries are not often a national or regional governance priority and as a result, inland capture fisheries are undervalued and largely overlooked. As such they are threatened in both developing and developed countries. Indeed, due to lack of reliable data, inland fisheries have never been part of any high profile global fisheries assessment and are notably absent from the Sustainable Development Goals. The general public and policy makers are largely ignorant of the plight of freshwater ecosystems and the fish they support, as well as the ecosystem services generated by inland fisheries. This ignorance is particularly salient given that the current emphasis on the food-water-energy nexus often fails to include the important role that inland fish and fisheries play in food security and supporting livelihoods in low-income food deficit countries. Developing countries in Africa and Asia produce about 11 million tonnes of inland fish annually, 90 % of the global total. The role of inland fisheries goes beyond just kilocalories; fish provide important micronutrients and essentially fatty acids. In some regions, inland recreational fisheries are important, generating much wealth and supporting livelihoods. The following three key recommendations are necessary for action if inland fisheries are to become a part of the foodwater-energy discussion: invest in improved valuation and assessment methods, build better methods to effectively govern inland fisheries (requires capacity building and incentives), and develop approaches to managing waters across sectors and scales. Moreover, if inland fisheries are recognized as important to food security, livelihoods, and human well-being, they can be more easily incorporated in regional, national, and global policies and agreements on water issues. Through these approaches, inland fisheries can be better evaluated and be more fully recognized in broader water resource and aquatic ecosystem planning and decision-making frameworks, enhancing their value and sustainability for the future.

Recently it has been hypothesized that climate change will affect total factor productivity growth. Given the importance of TFP for long-run economic growth, if true this would entail a substantial upward revision of current impact estimates. Using macro TFP data from a recently developed dataset in the Penn World Table, we test this hypothesis by directly examining the nature of the relationship between annual temperature shocks and TFP growth rates in the period 1960–2006. The results show a negative relationship only exists in poor countries, where a 1 °C annual increase in temperature decreases TFP growth rates by about 1.1–1.8 percentage points, whereas the impact is indistinguishable from zero in rich countries. Extrapolating from weather to climate, the possibility of dynamic effects of climate change in poor countries increases concerns over the distributional issues of future impacts and, from a policy perspective, restates the case for complementarity between climate policy and poverty reduction.

Sustainable development is a concern and a challenge of modern societies, either in developing and developed countries. Good governance is crucial to managing efficiently all kind of resources, including natural resources, for the well-being of current and future generations. Digital transformation can be a key driver of changes in governments if they want to enhance transparency, accountability and efficiency. E-government facilitates integrated policies and public services to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth, social development and environmental protection. E-government contributes to efficient resource management, and so can help to improve namely natural resource usage in the present to avoid damage to their usage in the future.The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of e-government on sustainable development. Using a logit model, for a sample of 103 countries in the period 2003–2018, the results suggest that e-government development is a positive determinant for a country to attain sustainable development, proxied by adjusted net savings, that embraces a country’s economic, social and environmental development. This study provides evidence that e-government increases the probability to attain sustainable development mostly in developing and transition economies.The results also suggest that economic growth and gross national income per capita are significant positive influences in sustainable development in the whole sample and that countries with lower age dependency and natural resource rents are more likely to have sustainable development.Developing e-government allows promoting sustainable development, particularly in developing and in transition economies.

Free trade has been identified as an effective conduit for enhancing economic growth and development. However, encouraging free trade has several environmental implications. As African countries commit to implementing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, the need arises for research to be conducted into assessing the implications of the expected increase in free trade on the environment. It is against this backdrop, as well as the paucity of literature in the subject area, that the study seeks to assess the economic implications of free trade arising from preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on environmental quality in Africa. The study further attempts to establish the effect of institutional quality on environmental quality in Africa. The study’s theoretical framework is based on the trade-environment nexus model developed by Antweiler (AER 91:877–908, 2001) and employs the panel ARDL model for analysis, using data on thirty African countries, over the period 1990–2016. Findings from the study revealed that negative trade-induced scale effect and composition effect dominates the positive trade-induced technique, thereby, suggesting that free trade is detrimental to environment quality in the long-run, using natural resource depletion and carbon dioxide as measures of environmental quality. The study further found improvement in institutional quality (through enhancement in regulatory quality) to have a positive effect on environmental quality. The study recommends that afforestation policies should form an integral part of governments’ developmental agenda in Africa. Also, government policies should be geared towards encouraging businesses to adopt green technologies, whereas households are motivated to employ and sustain the use of clean energy.

Gender differences in concern about climate change are highly correlated with economic development: when countries are wealthier, a gap emerges whereby women are more likely than men to express concern about our changing climate. These differences stem from cross-national variation in men’s attitudes. Men, more than women, tend to be less concerned about climate change when countries are wealthier. This article develops a new theory about the perceived costs and benefits of climate mitigation policy to explain this pattern. At the country level, the perceived benefits of mitigation tend to decrease with economic development, whereas the perceived costs increase. At the individual level, the perceived costs of mitigation tend to increase with economic development for men more than for women. Evidence from existing surveys from every world region, an original 10-country survey in the Americas and Europe, and focus groups in Peru and the United States support the theory.

This article seeks to shed new light on the study of decentralized natural resource governance by applying institutional theories of polycentricity-the relationships among multiple authorities with overlapping jurisdictions. The emphasis on multi-level dynamics has not penetrated empirical studies of environmental policy reforms in nonindustrial countries. On the contrary, many of today's decentralization proponents seem to be infatuated with the local sphere, expecting that local actors are always able and willing to govern their natural resources effectively. Existing studies in this area often focus exclusively on characteristics and performance of local institutions. While we certainly do not deny the importance of local institutions, we argue that institutional arrangements operating at other governance scales-such as national government agencies, international organizations, NGOs at multiple scales, and private associations-also often have critical roles to play in natural resource governance regimes, including self-organized regimes.

This study investigates the relationship between natural resource rents, human development and economic growth in Sudan using co-integration and vector error correction modelling (VECM) over the period 1970-2015. Institutions proved to play a role in determining a difference in whether a country is cured or blessed by resource abundance. In the case of Sudan, no time series data is available on institutional quality and is therefore excluded from the analysis. The role of institutions and macroeconomic policies is captured by other variables included in the empirical model. Co-integration tests confirm the existence of a long run equilibrium relationship between resource rents, human development and economic growth in Sudan. Empirical evidence from the estimated VECM shows that economic growth is positively affected by resource rents and development expenditure but surprisingly negatively affected by life expectancy at birth in the short run. In the long run, resource rents, school enrolment, life expectancy and financial development have negative significant effects on economic growth. Only development expenditure is found to affect economic growth positively. Resource rents are found to weaken education and health levels and this is indirectly channeled into negative effects of resource rents on economic growth. These results suggest that the government has been neglecting investments to build up human capital necessary for inclusive growth. Long run Granger causality tests show a unidirectional causal relationship running from resource rents to GDP growth as well as from development expenditure to GDP growth. School enrollment, life expectancy and financial development are found to be negatively Granger causing GDP growth. Long run causal relationships reconfirm that a resource curse exists indirectly mediated by weak human capital. The study recommends that the government should manage natural resource rents with a policy framework supporting creation of a virtuous economic circle between human development and economic growth. If pursued, this would promote sustained, inclusive and equitable growth in Sudan.

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India's environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial improvements in air quality. The most successful air regulation resulted in a modest but statistically insignificant decline in infant mortality. In contrast, the water regulations had no measurable benefits. The available evidence leads us to cautiously conclude that higher demand for air quality prompted the effective enforcement of air pollution regulations, indicating that strong public support allows environmental regulations to succeed in weak institutional settings.