Discusses what steps were taken by the Cooperative Extension Service in Oklahoma, after the energy crisis began, to help landowners make better decisions regarding oil and gas leases. Oklahoma's Extension educational efforts in mineral rights management have been successful because they met the needs of the people. (EM)

Dozens of countries have decentralized at least part of their natural resource policies over the last two decades. Despite the length of time that these policy experiments have been in force, there is little agreement about their effectiveness. We argue that part of this ambivalence stems from three limitations of extant studies, suggesting that…