Citizen monitoring in environmental disclosure: An economics perspective.

Criticism is mounting that market-led and state-led initiatives for environmental impact disclosure are too limited in scope and that they rest on too strong assumptions about the quality and impartiality of monitoring and enforcement, with resulting insufficient effect on environmental sustainability. It has been proposed that citizen monitoring may contribute to counteract this void. However, to our knowledge, policy analysis in general and economics in particular has not paid much attention to this role of citizen monitoring. This paper aims to bridge that gap from an economics lens, by exploring the dynamics of disclosing local environmental impact and the potential role of citizen monitoring in environmental policy. To this end, the paper addresses monopolistic versus pluralistic environmental disclosure, letting citizen monitoring represent the latter. The study uses the mining industry as an illustrative case, because of that sector's particular transparency challenges in international value chains, typically with strong negative local environmental impact. It is shown how pluralistic information provision such as citizen monitoring can contribute to incentivizing more reliable information provision, especially in countries with weak state institutions, which is particularly important in the case of high-risk environmental impact. The findings should be of use for shaping environmental policy, providing valuable insights for both policymakers and scholars.

The heterogeneity of public ex situ collections of microorganisms: Empirical evidence about conservation practices, industry spillovers and public goods.

Public service (ex situ) micro-organism collections serve to secure genetic resources for unforeseen future needs, and importantly, to provide authenticated biomaterials for contemporaneous use in private and public entities and as upstream research materials. Hence, it is important to understand the functioning and strategic decisions of these providers of public good resources. The existing literature tends to use case studies of individual collections. This paper uses a unique worldwide survey of microbial collections to analyse the heterogeneity among culture collections, and to empirically assess the economic and institutional conditions that contribute to this heterogeneity with respect to conservation choice and associated industry spillovers. Results suggest that in the short run public-private partnerships may indeed support knowledge accumulation with particularly strong public good properties. It is important to be aware of this strong tie, in order to steer also the long term conservation patrimony into one that offers not only short term usability but also resilience to future unforeseen needs e.g. of emerging crop plagues.