Context sensitive policy instruments: A multi-criteria decision analysis for safeguarding forest habitats in Southwestern Finland

Environmental and conservation decisions are often complex, which results in complexity also in policy assessments. Conservation decisions have implications for different stakeholders and typically draw on multidisciplinary knowledge bases, incorporating natural, physical and social sciences, politics and ethics. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is a potentially important tool for supporting conservation policy decisions. This article reports a spatially referenced MCDA of policy instrument scenarios for conserving forest biodiversity in Southwestern Finland. The effects of the realistic policy instruments designed in dialogue with stakeholders included voluntary permanent conservation, enforced spatially concentrated permanent conservation, voluntary permanent conservation with active nature management, and voluntary temporary conservation. These instruments were compared by combining forest-owner survey, MCDA and ex ante impact evaluation. The main objective was to find the forest biodiversity conservation instrument that would produce the highest total benefit. The effects of the different instruments were evaluated with ecological, economic, social, and institutional criteria after a 20-year time period. The results showed minor differences between the instruments, with voluntary permanent and voluntary temporary conservation producing the largest total benefit. Despite the small differences, the analysis was robust in showing that voluntary instruments were more favourable than enforced permanent conservation.     

Auctions as a Means of Creating a Market for Public Goods from Agriculture

The paper looks at the possibility of creating a market for environmental goods and services in the countryside by awarding conservation contracts to farmers on the basis of competitive bidding. Auctions have several theoretical advantages over alternative allocation mechanisms (such as standard-rate payments) because they allow the participants to deal with informational asymmetries and the uncertainty about the value of the (non-market) goods being traded. A formal model of bidding behaviour in ‘green auctions’ shows that bidding strategies are determined by the individual farmers' costs of implementing the conservation contracts and their beliefs about the maximum acceptable payment level, making the auction an imperfect cost revelation mechanism. Auctions can reduce the information rents accruing to farmers and can increase the cost-effectiveness of public goods provision. Strategic bidding behaviour in multiple-signup auctions as well as high transaction costs are potential sources of reduced efficiency.     

Optimal conservation investment for a biodiversity‐rich agricultural landscape*

This study develops a theoretical and empirical framework for optimal conservation planning using satellite land cover data and economic data from a farm survey. A case study is presented for a region within the South‐west Australia Biodiversity Hotspot (Nature 403, 853). This Biodiversity Hotspot is a focus for conservation investment as it combines a relatively high level of biodiversity with severe threat to the biodiversity from agriculture. The conservation planning model developed determines the optimal set of bush fragments for conservation. This model can also be used to assess the trade‐off between the budget and a vegetation species metric. Results from the case study show that, without an effective conservation scheme that at least fences fragments, significant plant biodiversity losses will occur in the North East Wheatbelt Regional Organisation of Councils region of the WA wheatbelt over a 10‐year period. A perfect price discriminating auction scheme could reduce the costs of conservation by around 17 per cent relative to a fixed‐payment scheme; however, a fixed payment on outcome (measured as change in the species metric) scheme represents a viable second‐best alternative, to a conservation auction, where conservation spending is spatially targeted.     

Sustainable agricultural intensification: the role of cardamom agroforestry in the East Usambaras,Tanzania

The East Usambaras in Tanzania are a tropical biodiversity hotspot where current agricultural management practices pose threats to forest conservation and development objectives. Promoting sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) would improve long-term productivity and reduce pressure on forest reserves. The study objective was to identify household-level characteristics that influence adoption of improved management practices, specifically soil replenishment practices, in order to identify opportunities and constraints to scaling up SAI to landscape level. First, three common farming systems and a fourth agroforestry (AF) model were developed to estimate the relative profitability of incorporating fallow, manure, and non-timber forest product activities. Next, household surveys were conducted and a logistic regression analysis was used to measure the influence of socioeconomic characteristics, physical and financial assets, tenure security, and plot-specific attributes on adoption of soil replenishment practices that were specified in the model. Findings showed that the AF model was financially competitive but raises opportunity costs to labour when compared to common systems. Marital status, household size, remittances, credit access, and tenure security significantly influenced adoption of fallow and applying organic inputs. Significant plot-specific attributes included perceived fertility and distance from the homestead. Policies to scale up SAI should consider these factors and emphasize improving markets for AF species and extension services.     

The Australian experience in using tenders for conservation

Over the past 15 years Australia has been trialling conservation tenders and other market based instrument approaches to generate environmental outcomes, particularly on private lands. The best known of these is the BushTender auction for vegetation protection in Victoria, begun in the early 2000s. Subsequently, nearly 100 other tenders for biodiversity protection have been run in Australia with substantial variations in application and methodology generated by a mix of both intended design and case study differences. The number of separate conservation tenders that have been performed, and the variations in environmental targets, state jurisdictions, case study circumstances, design and implementation, provides a rich data base of projects for analysis – unique at the international level.The review section of the paper covers three broad areas. The first aim is to provide an overview of the various tenders and their history and design in different settings. The second is to review their application, particularly in relation to auction design, metric design and contract design aspects, while the third is to identify the extent to which tenders provided more cost-effective outcomes than alternatives such a fixed rate grants. An additional goal is to explain why, after so many trials, conservation tenders are not more widely used in Australia. Key conclusions are that the multiple trials show that tenders are robust, relatively simple to apply and deliver more cost-effective allocations of public funding than other grant mechanisms. The reasons for their limited use can be related more to political and bureaucratic forces and inertia rather than to economic and design limitations.     

Practising “biodiversity” in Guinea: nature,nation and an international convention

Biodiversity has become a central organizing concept both in international environmental debate and among government departments, donors and non-governmental organizations in the Republic of Guinea. This article explores how international imperatives around biodiversity are articulating with existing and historically-shaped practices of science and policy in Guinea, and the extent to which villagers' perspectives gain or fail to gain influence and authority. At least four sets of science and policy practices currently characterize biodiversity conservation practices, including: (1) the listing of plant and animal species; (2) the exploration of ecosystem dynamics through “cutting edge” computer modelling techniques; (3) the harnessing of traditional plant medicines, linked with discussion of biopiracy; and (4) the promotion of “semi-wild” plants, such as oil palm. Each set of practices involves different social relations and funding of science, different international networks and different political discourses, while each also carries wider importance in shaping national and local social categories and identities. A common feature is that the framing and institutional/funding imperatives linked to international biodiversity debates have promoted practices that reproduce western, colonial distinctions between nature and culture in ways which compromise attempts at “participatory” conservation.     

Auction winning,social dynamics and non-compliance in a payment for ecosystem services scheme in Indonesia

Conservation auctions for payment for ecosystem services (PES) are useful to identify the levels of incentives that will cover the opportunity costs of farmers supplying ecosystem services. Although auctions are increasingly used for allocation in PES schemes, the factors that lead to their successful implementation and eventual environmental outcomes are poorly understood in developing countries. We investigated the socio-economic and institutional contexts that led to smallholders' auction winning and eventual compliance using linear mixed-effects models, and post-auction and post-contract surveys. We employed a case study of a conservation contract preceded by a sealed-bid, multiple round, uniform price auction for watershed services from coffee farmers in Lampung, Indonesia. The auction participants presented low education levels, low asset endowments and small plot sizes. The study obtained evidence that farmers with larger plot areas were more likely to win the contracts, suggesting economies of scale. Most farmers considered the auction a fair self-selection mechanism to allocate contracts where allocation was not influenced by power or social rank. Non-compliance was associated with labor availability constraints, short duration of land ownership and existence of previous conservation applications, suggesting lax of capability to invest in applying conservation agriculture. Final bids were however not good predictors of compliance, among other factors, calling into question the potential of auctions to elicit the actual incentive from the farmers. Ensuring that farmers understand the purposes of auctions for effective contract allocation beyond a mere game and identifying farmers that might encounter difficulties fulfilling the contract could increase the likelihood that such a PES scheme would be successful.     

Compulsory purchase for biodiversity conservation in the Netherlands

Policy instruments are the building blocks of land use policies. Instrumentation of policies relates to values. Compulsory purchase is a direct government instrument that may be an effective way to implement policies of biodiversity conservation and the allocation of land for recreational use. It is, however, in many contexts, politically controversial. The Netherlands’ Government has endorsed policies that involve compulsory purchase in up to 10% of land purchases. This paper reviews if this 10%-ceiling can structure relationships between landowners and government agencies in such a way that it relieves constraints imposed by land availability for biodiversity conservation and the provision of recreational areas. The analysis consists of (1) the background of this 10%-ceiling, (2) the actual procedures of compulsory purchase, by analysis of Royal Decrees, (3) the actual compulsory purchases, and (4) the indirect instrumental effects of the use of this instrument. The paper concludes that the 10%-ceiling does not lift the constraints of land availability, but does influence the relationship between stakeholders, the implementation of biodiversity objectives, and land policy strategies. Nevertheless, compulsory purchase may provide possibilities to acquire land necessary for a consolidated natural area.     

Evaluating sustainability options in an agricultural frontier of the Amazon using multi-criteria analysis

Agricultural expansion and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon are driven by a complex interaction between economic and demographic drivers and institutional constraints. Land use policies such as Conservation Units and the Forest Code law should conserve biodiversity and other environmental aspects while, on the other hand, increasing commodity prices of beef and soy, driven by world markets provokes economic growth and expansion of the agricultural area. We carried out an impact assessment in eleven municipalities within an agricultural frontier along the road BR-163 that runs in the Brazilian Amazon states of Mato-Grosso and Pará. The impact assessment, covered a period between 2008 and 2020, showed that the autonomous development in the study area results in a strong increase in the performance of economic indicators but a reduction in environmental and some social indicators. The studied conservation policies are able to reduce negative environmental impacts to some extent, while hardly affecting economic and social indicators. The multi-criteria analysis (MCA) showed a trade-off relation between the economic and environmental dimension in such a way that the effect was much stronger in the high commodity price scenario than in the low price scenario. The policy implications of the MCA results are discussed in light of the institutional capacity of the Brazilian States under study, to implement effective conservation policies.     

制度逻辑、制度矛盾与合作社的“公司化”

为了回答合作社为什么会"公司化"这一问题,本文首先将合作社的"公司化"归为组织形式改变这一理论范畴,然后在组织分析的新制度主义范式下,建立制度逻辑导致合作社组织形式改变的理论模型,最后运用解释性案例研究方法予以实证。研究发现:第一,农业产业化逻辑和农业市场化逻辑是合作社走向"公司化"的重要制度原因;第二,上述两大制度逻辑同合作社的法定形式存在冲突并由此带来制度不兼容、组织非效率和利益错配三大制度矛盾;第三,三大制度矛盾分别提供内生驱动力、制度资源和自主的行动者,从而导致合作社的"公司化"。     

Auctions for conservation contracts: an empirical examination of Victoria's BushTender trial

The present paper proposes that markets for nature conservation on private land are missing because of the problem of asymmetric information. An auction of conservation contracts was designed to reveal hidden information needed to facilitate meaningful transactions between landholders and government. The present paper describes the key elements of auction and contract design employed and the results obtained from a pilot auction of conservation contracts run in two regions of Victoria. The pilot demonstrated that it was possible to create at least the supply side of a market for nature conservation and in conjunction with a defined budget, prices were discovered and resources allocated through contracts with landholders. The present paper compares a discriminative price auction with a hypothetical fixed-price scheme showing that an auction could offer large cost savings to governments interested in nature conservation on private land. The paper identifies some important design problems that would need to be solved before auctions could be applied more broadly including: multiple complementary outcomes, reserve prices, sequential auction design and contract design. Nevertheless, the paper does show that auctioning conservation contracts for environmental outcomes is an important new policy mechanism that deserves closer examination.     

Combining management plans and payment schemes for targeted grassland conservation within the Habitats Directive in Saxony,Eastern Germany

As central policies for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes in the European Union (EU), the Habitats Directive and Agri-environmental programmes (AEP) have largely failed to halt biodiversity loss. In response, the German federal state of Saxony combined the instrument of management plans with AEPs to support the implementation of the Habitat Directive. In this study, we investigate the determinants of a farmers’ decisions to adjust their farming practices. Our data set consists of a quantitative survey with 131 farmers conducted between 2004 and 2011, complemented by implementation data from 333 grassland-plots. Determinants of farmers’ decisions to conserve grassland were estimated using a multinomial logit model. Our results show that a combination of management plans and AEPs can increase farmers’ disposition to adopt nature conservation measures. As central determinants, structural and location factors as well as the complementary provisiion of specifically designed AEPs increase farmers’ willingness to adopt conservation practices for grassland management. It can be concluded that additional costs are a major barrier to farmers’ adoption, particularly to those farms directing their farm management towards the optimisation of productivity and profitability . The findings highlight the complementary potential of integrated policy packages to incentivise specific measures of nature conservation within the framework of the Habitats Directive.     

Anticipating a new conservation bureaucracy? Land and power in Indonesia’s Essential Ecosystem Area policy

As an emerging policy in Indonesia, “Essential Ecosystem Areas” (EEA) is being established as an instrument to expand protections for conservation areas at sites beyond the classical domain of the conservation bureaucracy. The policy impetus is from recent global research identifying high conservation values located outside of formally designated conservation areas. EEA policy provides a foundation for justifying conservation practices at sites based on high biodiversity indicators, but which might not have previously held formal protections. This policy instrument is particularly unique in Indonesia because it is envisioned to support initiatives that emerge voluntarily, even in areas that might not have been historically thought of as conservation areas. This is unusual because it applies to all land categories, including private and public lands. In this article, we introduce the EEA policy and identify the potential applications it might have, considering the possibilities for future conservation area management in Indonesia. In particular, we identify some key principles for researchers and practitioners to follow when assessing EEA implementation. Our organizing framework consists of several elements based on existing land and power characteristics, which we connect to the institutions that might emerge amidst these new policy arrangements. We apply the land and power framework to two emerging EEA sites in Sulawesi to anticipate the extent to which the policy suggests a future trajectory for conservation management, or whether conservation policy will remain tied to existing rigid bureaucratic structures. Findings from the two cases point to the continued primacy of the centralized conservation bureaucracy, indicating that EEA sites are being negotiated through the classical approach for administering conservation areas.     

Land owners’ perception of land consolidation and their satisfaction with the results – Slovenian experiences

Land consolidation has been an important instrument of rural development for over a century throughout Europe. Nowadays, land consolidation can be an integral part of both rural and urban development projects, but the focus of our study is on land consolidation in rural areas. In addition to the efforts aimed at making agriculture and forestry more competitive through a comprehensive reallocation process, improvement of road and drainage networks, landscaping, environmental management, conservation projects, and other functions may be implemented in land consolidation. There are differences in the objectives and procedures of land consolidation among the countries. Beside the formal institutional framework of land consolidation, informal institutions can have a substantial influence on the implementation of land consolidation. In the article, the past experiences in the field of land consolidation in Slovenia are presented, which are still reflected in the limited acceptability of this instrument among land owners. Furthermore, the current institutional (legal) framework is analyzed in detail. The main objective of the research was to investigate the opinion of land consolidation participants about land consolidation. Based on the field survey conducted on a sample of private land owners involved in selected land consolidation projects we tried to define the advantages and disadvantages of the current practice. The main finding is that the active participation of land owners contributes to their comprehension of the aims and to their satisfaction with the results of the land consolidation. It has been shown that the active participation of land owners in the land consolidation is the basis for developing good practices; moreover, it affects the land owners’ perception of land consolidation. The transfer of knowledge and representation of good practices among actors are still needed, in particular because of bad experiences in the past (i.e. enforced and environmentally unfriendly projects) and the traditional emotional attachment to land among land owners. In parallel, there is a great need to provide an optimization of the land consolidation process in Slovenia.     

The adaptive efficiency of land use planning measured by the control of urban sprawl. The cases of the Netherlands,Belgium and Poland

The paper aims to position the concept of adaptive efficiency in planning theory, by providing insights on the conditions that explain why land use planning in some institutional contexts is able to adapt and improve more efficiently than in others. This is done by focusing on a specific planning goal: the control of residential sprawl. The paper presents a theoretical framework based on two models, one on the coordinating mechanisms regarding the use of land and one to explain institutional changes. This framework is exploited with empirical case studies where we compare the control of sprawl in the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland. The analysis diagnoses a duality of planning practices. Even though planning failures occur in the Netherlands as well, we provide evidence that Dutch land use planning has been able to efficiently adapt regulatory instruments and collaborative practices to societal changes. By contrast, Belgian and Polish planners face huge difficulties to incorporate new initiatives to control urban sprawl or, in more general terms, to reinforce their influence on land uses.     

What role for cooperation in conservation tenders? Paying farmer groups in the High Andes

This paper sheds light on the potential of group-level tenders to enhance conservation where it depends on cooperation of small-scale farmers. We analyze data from two pilot payment for ecosystem service (PES) schemes focused on the conservation of agricultural biodiversity in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. Contracts were assigned to farming groups who could choose between different types of in-kind payments with varying degrees of divisibility between group members. Our main results indicate that: (1) stronger general patterns of collective action are positively related to the level of cooperation in group-bid making; (2) where collective action is robust, collective payments seem to provide stronger conservation incentives than individual payments; (3) collective payments could mitigate some potential rent-seeking behavior; (4) selecting bid offers based on both a ‘cooperation’ criterion and conservation land area offered does not overly compromise the cost-effectiveness of PES; and (5) group-level contracts may create strong incentives for contract compliance. Hence, combining farmer group-level contracts with collective in-kind payments can enhance the cost-effectiveness of conservation tenders, while generating co-benefits in terms of increased interaction and social capital among group members.     

Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services: An overview of Latin American experiences,lessons learned and upscaling challenges

Many developing countries face a major challenge today: how to safeguard the biodiversity maintained in the fields of the rural poor - which constitute a national and global public good - whilst meeting those same people's development needs and rights? A solution to this dilemma has thus been sought in adapting the design and implementation of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) concepts to the conservation of agrobiodiversity.Here we review the application of nine such Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation (PACS) schemes that have been applied to date in four Latin American countries over the period 2010–2018. These covered 130 threatened varieties across a number of major food crops, and involved over 100 farming communities and 1,100 farmers (45 % of which were women). Conservation service offers were received through a competitive tender mechanism. Average bid offers revealed high heterogeneity, varying between US$675/ha. to ten times as much.In relation to issues identified as key to PES, such as spatial targeting, differentiated payments and conditionality, the underlying design of the PACS schemes may be considered solid. PACS-related prioritisation processes allow for the a priori identification of sites with high ecosystem service densities and high threat levels. The use of competitive tenders permits accounting for cost heterogeneity in the provision of conservation services and for payments to be differentiated. Conditionality is strong.In terms of implementation, a “back of the envelope” calculation based on the results of the competitive tenders suggests that conservation costs are modest. For a priority conservation portfolio of 100 varieties (which may be from different crops) each with a target area of five hectares, costs would amount to just under US$860,000 over twenty years or US$70,000 p.a. at a 5 % discount rate. The small-scale and one-off nature of the interventions realised to date, along with threatened crop variety seed availability constraints, have however meant that environmental effectiveness has been incomplete in the short-term (area cultivated with specific threatened varieties increased, but still below the “not at risk” threshold). The establishment of systematic monitoring systems is required to determine longer-term impacts and inform more regular PACS interventions within a dynamically evolving systems context.     

Environmental policy integration: Towards a communicative approach in integrating nature conservation and urban planning in Bulgaria

As urban areas continue to expand, the need to consider nature conservation objectives in planning is growing. Policy makers across Europe recognize that effective nature conservation requires an integrated approach to land use planning that includes relevant ecological and spatial knowledge. Although a number of such integrated approaches have been developed, many local authorities in Europe encounter important institutional barriers to this integration. This is particularly true for countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) like Bulgaria. The post-socialist transformation in Bulgaria led to intensified urban growth and local authorities struggle to find a balance between environmental and socio-economic interests. Meanwhile, the Environmental Policy Integration ‘principle’ (EPI) has been gaining prominence in Europe, aiming to address the trade-offs between environmental and economic incentives. Research highlights that successful EPI depends on institutional processes within different economic sectors and across governmental scales. These processes have not yet been comprehensively studied in the CEE and in Bulgaria. This article assesses the EPI process in urban planning in Bulgaria and identifies the institutional approaches that may contribute best to EPI in urban planning. Using the example of the “Corner Land” project in the city of Burgas, we discuss the key challenges that the local authorities face in addressing nature conservation in land use plans. The findings indicate that EPI is to a high degree constrained by the lack of an efficient communicative process across fragmented organizational structures throughout the entire planning process. While a procedural approach to EPI appears to be prevalent it is concluded that a communicative approach is urgently needed if the sustainability of urban plans is to be safeguarded and negative impacts on nature prevented.     

Farmers,institutions and technology in agricultural change processes: outcomes from Adaptive Research on rice production in Sulawesi,Indonesia

International agricultural research centres use approaches which aim to create effective linkages between the practices of farmers, introduced technologies and the wider environment that affects farming. This paper argues that such new approaches require a different type of monitoring as a complement to conventional approaches that tend to favour a quantitative assessment of adoption and impact at the farm level. In this context, we examined monitoring data from an Adaptive Research (AR) project highlighting complementary qualitative analysis. Our emphasis is to capture the improvisational capacities of farmers and to reveal social and institutional constraints and opportunities in a broader innovation system. Our approach provided clear insights into how rice farmers adjusted their practices and how actors involved linked (or not) with others in the innovation system. We also demonstrated how institutions such as policies, religious rituals or service provider arrangements pose conditions that establish or constrain practices aligned with introduced technologies. A broader perspective in monitoring AR therefore provides important additional insights into the factors which shape outcomes in farming communities. To expand outcomes, AR projects should also pay attention to designing and testing new institutional arrangements that create enabling conditions for agricultural innovation.     

浙江森林生物多样性保护与可持续发展研究

森林生物多样性丰富,但森林生物多样性资源利用与保护的协调存在许多问题。原因在于:人类中心论的观念、保护的“外部性”特点、国家宏观调控能力和财力不足、经济利益驱动。因此,必须从理念、法规、制度、方法、手段等各层面上改进,加强各保护环节的工作,才能使森林生物多样性得到更有效的保护。