Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Giving Process Its Due : Can Collaboration Help Environmental Markets Succeed?, John Robert Cochran

Dissertations and Theses

Emerging environmental markets assign economic value to ecosystem services and exchange them in market-like transactions. These markets are characterized by diverse stakeholder interests interacting with minimally defined transaction steps and high uncertainty. In this context, process plays an important role in shaping the institutions that make markets work or fail. If process matters, then market organizers need to intentionally craft processes just as they intentionally design institutions. This project explores a subset of four relatively established water quality trading programs that involved diverse stakeholders, and used differing forms of collaboration to design institutions. This research tests whether sometimes subtle changes …