The Political economy forum

For over a quarter century, the federal government has been the primary determinant of environmental regulation and policy. The contributors to this volume provide a wide variety of strategies to challenge Washington's unsophisticated, ineffective, and harmful approaches. The original essays demonstrate how states can improve environmental regulations as they apply to land, water, wildlife, and pesticides, and they provide a general framework for how states can regain control of their environmental destiny. Important reading for anyone interested in environmental policy studies.

Most research on American Indian economies seeking to explain why Indians have remained near the bottom of the economic ladder has concentrated on resource endowments. This approach has focused policy attention on creating government programs to expand resource exploitation either by encouraging non-Indians to develop reservation resources or by directly enhancing reservation physical and human capital stocks. However, these policies have ignored institutions and the important role of local customs and privileges. This book explicitly considers this institutional context and focuses on the rules that determine who controls physical and human resources and who benefits from their use. Applying the analytical tools from economics, law, anthropology, and political science, the authors consider the three main ingredients necessary for successful economies: stable government, minimal bureaucracies, and the rule of law.

In the American West, trappers, miners, and farmers often preceded the formal institutions of government and therefore had to invent their own institutional framework. Early historians like Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb found heroes in this romantic frontier. Modern historians, however, are challenging the traditional histories, arguing that the history of the West is one of natural resource waste, minority exploitation, and political manipulation by a powerful elite. This book challenges many conclusions from both schools in a framework that considers western history as an episode in the evolution of property rights. The authors in this volume provide a new way of thinking about the West that relies neither on heroes nor villains but argues that economics and politics shaped the institutional environment of the American West