ABSTRACT
Rural households satisfy their needs by interacting not only with markets, neighbours, and the state, but also with ecosystems. Households produce private goods for the market and for self-consumption by deciding daily over their use of land, labour and other inputs, by choosing technologies and by extracting resources from local commons such as mangroves, watersheds, forests or fisheries. These decisions have effects on their individual and group well-being by imposing externalities in time and space depending on the rates of use of such ecosystems.
