Between the 1970s and the 2000s, Costa Rica became established as the world’s leading ecotourism destination. This article argues that although Costa Rica benefited from biodiversity and a pleasant climate, the country’s preeminence in ecotourism requires more than a natural resource endowment explanation. While previous literature has emphasized the efforts of the government and nongovernment organizations, this article demonstrates the critical role of small entrepreneurs in the co-creation of the industry. Making extensive use of oral history, the article explores the role of tour companies in drawing affluent Western ecotourists to the country, and of the creators of ecolodges and other forms of accommodation in providing them with somewhere to stay. Clustering created positive externalities, drawing new entrepreneurs into the industry who could also learn from knowledge spillovers. There were downsides to the new industry. The creation of the national image of a natural paradise enabled many businesses which were not environmentally sustainable to free ride on the green image.

Georg Jellinek was one of the legal theorists who brought a new level of methodological sophistication to German public law scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century. Where previous research has called attention to his theory of conceptual “types” and his application of contemporary neo-Kantian epistemology to the law, this article explores his thinking on the nature of values and value judgments, and the possibilities for objectivity in the legal and political sciences. Jellinek sought to open an increasingly calcified legal positivism to the findings of the social sciences and to an inherently pluralistic, changing world of subjective values, but without abandoning the positivist ideals of legal certainty and the exclusion of political and other value judgments. Analyzing his response to this challenge opens a window onto his broader work in public law and political science, illuminating doctrines like the “two-sided” theory of the state and the “normative power of the factual,” which have achieved a lasting place in German legal and political theory. It also shows why Jellinek put aside the traditional ideal of bias-free objectivity for a surprisingly modern vision of a process of intersubjective agreement, driven by the institutions of free and open scholarly debate.