NGOs and Environmental Public Goods: Institutional Alternatives to Property Rights

NGOs are linked to environmental objectives for good reason: non-profit NGOs provide a flexible, private-sector answer to the provision of international environmental public goods. The non-profit sector can link for-profit, non-profit, and public-sector objectives in complex contracts. This article examines how, for the case of the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) in Costa Rica, such complex contracts with both domestic and international parties provide partial solutions to public goods problems in the absence of private property rights over genetic resources. INBio's ‘monopoly’ position, legitimized by the local government, brings in rents from genetic resources which are reinvested in the production of public goods.     

Application of Hurst Resecaling to Geophysical Serial Data

The empirical investigation of several geophysical time series indicates that they are composed of segments representing different natural regimes, or periods when events are strongly autocorrelated. Using a data transformation method developed by Hurst, these regimes are differentiated by rescaling the time series and examining the resulting transformed trace for inflections. As regime signals are not completely mixed and have rather long run lengths, Hurst rescaling produces a clustering of extremes of the same sign and elevates the Hurst exponent to values greater than 0.5. These regimes have a characteristic distribution, as defined by the mean and standard deviation, which differ from the statistical characteristics of the complete record. Analysis of sunspot numbers, monthly precipitation records from the midwestern United States, and annual watershed discharge yield regimes that correlate to well-documented periods of extreme activity. Rescaling appears to be useful in screening time series of unknown characteristics to differentiate periods dominated by regime-specific physical processes.     

Commodities and the Power of Prayer: Pentecostalist Attitudes Towards Consumption in Contemporary Ghana

This article addresses the phenomenal success of pentecostalism, a global religious movement par excellence, throughout postcolonial Africa. Investigating pentecostalist views of and attitudes towards commodities in southern Ghana, the article shows that pentecostalists represent the modern global economy as enchanted and themselves as agents of disenchantment: only through prayer may commodities cease to act as ‘fetishes’ which threaten the personal integrity and identity of their owners. Pentecostalism creates modern consumers through a ritual of prayer, which helps them handle globalization and control foreign commodities in such a way that they can be consumed without danger. Through prayer, commodities cease to possess their owners; the latter are rather enabled to possess the former. Pentecostalism engages in globalization by enabling its members to consume products from the global market and by offering its followers fixed orientation points and a well-delimited moral universe within globalization's unsettling flows.