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Three systems of rights to natural resources are studied in Ch. 7: private, communal, and state. Institutional failures are shown to be the cause of inefficiencies and inequities, both in momentary allocations of resources and in the inter‐generational transfer of resources. It is argued that in the world we have come to know, there is a bias in the use of the natural environment, in that use at any moment is excessive, not insufficient. Since observed prices frequently do not reflect the social worth of natural resources, use should be made of notional prices, called accounting prices.

This introductory chapter sets the background to the book and guides the reader through its main themes. The comments made are based on an exploration of three propositions. These are as follows: first, responsible global capitalism (RGC) should be considered not as an end in itself, but as a means of providing a richer, healthier, and more meaningful lifestyle for individuals and their families, and of advancing the economic objectives and social transformation of societies; second, in order to move towards a more acceptable global capitalism, the organizational structures and managerial strategies of each of its four participating institutions, viz. markets, governments, civil society, and supra‐national entities, need to be reconfigured and strengthened; and third, RGC can be achieved and sustained only if there is a strong and generally acceptable moral ecology, underpinning the attitudes, motives and behaviour of its constituent individuals and institutions (and in a transforming global society, this basis needs continual reappraisal and careful nurturing by the appropriate suasion, incentives, and regulatory mechanisms). Before going on to discuss the main issues raised by these three propositions, Dunning briefly defines the main global concepts dealt within the chapter: globalization itself, the global market place, global capitalism, and responsible global capitalism. Some of the issues raised and addressed in the chapter are the unique characteristics of GC, and how it relates to the sister concepts of the global market place and globalization; the reasons why the inter‐related functions of the four constituents of GC are presently suboptimal, and the challenges and opportunities offered by the globalizing economy; technical and institutional failures; and what needs to be done to upgrade moral standards.

This chapter considers critically the experience of educating barristers, and especially the attempts at educational reform undertaken in the middle of the eighteenth century. It describes the course followed by men who became practicing barristers. Formal and prescriptive education for the bar virtually ceased at the end of the seventeenth century, and individuals were largely left to their own devices. There was also considerable criticism of the results, which took both practical and cultural forms. Students and barristers complained about the lack of any institutional guidance and the poverty of educational literature, which were blamed for the frequency of drop-outs and the supposed incompetence of some barristers. Both the practical and cultural complaints tended ultimately to justify the common objections against English private law and its professors. The discussion reflects upon the reasons for considering the bar as a career and learning the law amidst institutional failure and professional criticism.

Institutions are designed to alter human behavior. To remain effective over time, institutions need to adapt to changes in the environment or the society the institution is meant to regulate. Douglas North referred to this property as adaptive efficiency and suggested the need for a model of how institutions change to remain effective. This essay contributes to a theory of adaptive efficiency by relating it to the burgeoning literature in robust system design. It reviews five models of institutional change, paying particular attention to each model’s ability to explain institutional adaptation. It isolates three common structural features of a robust, adaptive institutional system: diversity, modularity, and redundancy. It illustrates the theory with a brief application to federal systems, and closes by describing some open research questions relating to institutional adaptive efficiency.

If as is often argued, vigilante violence is caused by failures in policing, why would crowds attack suspects under arrest? To answer this question, this chapter examines a 2006 case in which two suspected rapists were dragged from a police car in KwaMashu and stoned to death. Interviews with residents reveal claims that the state’s procedural protections for suspects perpetuate insecurity, as suspects may be released following arrest and continue preying on residents. That is, even under circumstances when the state performs its duties, like arresting suspected criminals, some residents interpret such institutional effectiveness as potentially leading to state “failure” because the suspects are subject to juridical protections that could allow them to continue committing crimes and perpetuate local insecurity. By recognizing these ambiguous meanings of rights, we can explain vigilantism in cases where state institutions function effectively and account for why citizens would challenge the state’s legal processes through acts of vigilantism.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of dancers' decision-making processes, some of which have had extremely negative effects on their lives. It discusses how Vixens' dancers negotiated the straight world and explores dancers' aversion to accepting welfare and other social benefits they could be eligible for if they left the sex industry. Vixens' dancers call the low-wage labor market available to them outside the sex industry “the straight world” an environment they characterize as exploitative, exclusionary, and without hope for social mobility or financial stability. Dancers believe that in some ways they exist outside the straight world's social order, as is evident in the institutional failures that so often locate them outside the boundaries of full citizenship, yet they also maintain the belief that its normative frameworks offer them hope for social mobility.

This concluding chapter briefly summarizes the main argument and evidence in this book's study, noting key contributions before moving on to some key problems. It also identifies several legal and policy implications arising from this work. The first of these policy implications concerns prosecutions. Commanders, having done the work to make combatants violent, generally know, or should know, what combatants might do. The evidence presented here suggests that arguments about “bad apples” are almost universally disingenuous, designed to help commanders evade responsibility for crimes stemming from institutional failures. A second set of policy implications is primarily directed at policy elites in international organizations, governmental and nongovernmental. A final policy implication concerns wars themselves. The findings here suggest that restraint happens when combatants understand what they are doing and why. Restrained combatants understand and internalize both the purposes of the war and the ways that their behavior affects those purposes.