Network Economics and the Environment: Insights and Perspectives

Abstract

Local interactions and network structures appear to be a prominent feature of many environmental problems. This paper discusses a wide range of issues and potential areas of application, including the role of relational networks in the pattern of adoption of green technologies, common pool resource problems characterized by a multiplicity of sources, the role of social networks in multi-level environmental governance, infrastructural networks in the access to and use of natural resources such as oil and natural gas, the use of networks to describe the internal structure of inter-country relations in international agreements, and the formation of bilateral "links" in the process of building up an environmental coalition. For each of these areas, we examine why and how network economics would be an effective conceptual and analytical tool, and discuss the main insights that we can foresee.

Natural Resource Management: A Network Perspective

“…For a broad discussion on how networks can be used in order to facilitate the study of environmental issues see Currarini et al (2016). The authors explain that the application of network economics to environmental and resource issues is still in its infancy and there are a lot of issues that need to be explored by using this new approach.…”