A Holistic vs. an Attribute‐based Approach to Agri‐Environmental Policy Valuation: Do Welfare Estimates Differ?

Different economic valuation methodologies can be used to value the non‐market benefits of an agri‐environmental scheme. In particular, the non‐market value can be examined by assessing the public’s willingness to pay for the policy outputs as a whole or by modelling the preferences of society for the component attributes of the rural landscape that result from the implementation of the policy. In this article we examine whether the welfare values estimated for an agri‐environmental policy are significantly different between an holistic valuation methodology (using contingent valuation) and an attribute‐based valuation methodology (choice experiment). It is argued that the valuation methodology chosen should be based on whether or not the overall objective is the valuation of the agri‐environment policy package in its entirety or the valuation of each of the policy’s distinct environmental outputs.     

Challenges and Options for the UK Agri‐Environment: Presidential Address

After fifteen years of agri‐environment policy it is now appropriate to take stock of these policies. This is important because these policies are scheduled to expand in the coming decade, their benefits are likely to continue growing and the demand for benefits is also likely to expand. This paper therefore reviews the current agri‐environmental situation, isolating some of the current challenges to the schemes implemented in the UK, and compares main options for their amelioration. Finally it focuses particularly on the “end of contract problem” arising from the weak sustainability of the policy benefits from short‐term voluntary contracts.     

What socioenvironmental impacts did 35 years of export agriculture have in Mexico? (1980–2014): A transnational agri‐food field analysis

In this article, I propose to study environmental degradation and the deterioration of the health of workers and other inhabitants in regions of Mexico where intensive fruit and vegetable production for export has been developed. My proposition is that to understand the unsustainability of such agricultural practices in all their complexity, it is necessary to analyse historically the total agri‐food field of relations established by producers, distributors, and consumers in codependency with the natural environment. This analysis of the agri‐food field allows a multidimensional and multiscale study to be conducted of the hierarchical distribution of power and of economic benefits among the different social actors of the food system. This analysis also allowed us to study the development of the capitalist regime without going into the dichotomy of centre and periphery and to propose that it is a decentralized process with a multiplicity of locations that operates on the basis of mutual associations and influences between human and non‐human elements, with the active participation of a great variety of independent, collective, and institutional actors who have differentiated motivations, ranges of power and scales of value. The case study of Mexican export agriculture was the result of long‐term research based on a wide review of regional studies, field work statistics, and archives in Mexico and the United States. This cross‐border study makes it possible to identify asymmetrical transnational relations in a context in which the Mexican government has renounced its territorial and agri‐food sovereignty and Mexican consumers face greater vulnerability.     

On the Use of Targeting to Reduce Moral Hazard in Agri‐environmental Schemes

This paper investigates the role of targeting in the context of agri‐environmental schemes involving monitoring and penalties. By separating participants into a target and a nontarget group the aim of targeting is to reduce the moral hazard problem. The paper analyses three approaches to targeting which have different implications for the level of monitoring resources and the focus is on reducing the extent of cheating by participants in the nontarget group. By complementing the adoption of targeting with appropriate adjustments to the monitoring/penalty parameters, it is shown how such an approach can exploit the risk aversion of participants to completely eliminate cheating by those participants in the nontarget group. The implementation of such a system of targeting is discussed in the context of existing agri‐environmental policies.     

Using Geographically Weighted Choice Models to Account for the Spatial Heterogeneity of Preferences

In this paper, we investigate the use of geographically weighted choice models for modelling spatially clustered preferences. We argue that this is a useful way of generating highly‐detailed spatial maps of willingness to pay for environmental conservation, given the costs of collecting data. The data used in this study come from a discrete choice experiment survey of public preferences for the implementation of a new national forest management and protection programme in Poland. We combine these with high‐resolution spatial data related to local forest characteristics. Using locally estimated discrete choice models we obtain location‐specific estimates of willingness to pay (WTP). Variation in these estimates is explained by characteristics of the forests close to where respondents live. These results are compared with those obtained from a more typical, two stage procedure which uses Bayesian posterior means of the mixed logit model random parameters to calculate location‐specific estimates of WTP. We find that there are indeed strong spatial patterns to the benefits of changes to the management to national forests. People living in areas with more species‐rich forests and those living nearer bigger areas of mixed forests have significantly different WTP values than those living in other locations. This kind of information potentially enables a better distributional analysis of the gains and losses from changes to natural resource management, and better targeting of investments in forest quality.     

A Comparison Between the Conventional Stated Preference Technique and an Inferred Valuation Approach

Contrary to conventional stated preference valuation techniques that employ a direct questioning approach, the inferred valuation method utilises indirect questioning where respondents are asked for their belief regarding others’ values for a good or service. In this study, using choice experiments, we compare the results obtained through the two valuation techniques for environmental features of the Burren landscape in western Ireland. Consistent with previous studies, stated values using the conventional approach are found to be significantly higher than those obtained through the inferred valuation approach. In particular, this study highlights the dissimilarities in relative preferences observed between the two landscape attributes (rocky limestone pavements and orchid‐rich grasslands) from the two questioning formats. While respondents were indifferent between the two habitats, they believed the ‘average other’ to be significantly more concerned about the conservation of the rocky limestone pavements. We attribute this divergence in preferences to be a consequence of additional normative motives perceived by respondents with regard to the conservation of orchid‐rich grasslands.     

Trade‐offs in the performance of alternative farming systems

Numerous alternative farming systems are proposed as solutions to the sustainability challenges of today's conventional farming systems. In this paper, we review the production, environmental, and socioeconomic performance of three widely discussed and promoted alternative farming systems—organic, smallholder, and urban agriculture. We show that both organic and smallholder agricultures have some benefits, but also entail important trade‐offs; organic has environmental benefits, and also livelihood, health, and nutritional benefits for producers and consumers, but is hampered by lower yields and higher prices. Smaller farms have higher yields and host higher biodiversity, but are hampered by lower incomes to farmers. Urban agriculture can take some pressure off rural landscapes, provide nutritional benefits to the urban poor, and engage urban dwellers in addressing food system challenges, but it simply cannot scale up to be a substantial solution in and of itself. We suggest that instead of focusing on alternative systems, we should identify pathways to sustainable farming for all systems, reforming conventional systems where they perform poorly, and transitioning to alternative systems in contexts where they perform best.     

The Governance of Rural Land in a Liberalised World

Liberalisation of agricultural policies reduces the influence of policy on land‐use decisions, but environmental policy objectives remain. Governance provides an approach that recognises the role of institutions and collective action. The formulation of environmental policy objectives in terms of the provision of public goods raises questions as to the role of economic valuation and as to whether the definition of ‘goods’ may misdirect policy attention. An alternative approach relates to ecosystem services and sees management issues in terms of ecosystem resilience and the adaptive governance of socio‐ecological systems. Governance involves a mix of regulation, markets, government incentives and collective action. Regulation sets the domain within which markets operate and social judgements as to property rights are required as a basis for exchanges. Depending on commodity prices, agri‐environment schemes may be required either to reduce agricultural production intensity or to keep land under production. The diffuse nature of the environmental benefits and costs of land uses, the complexity of ecosystems and the need to co‐ordinate land management decisions indicate a role for local adaptive co‐management of land resources. Governments play a major role in supporting the institutional framework within which this can take place.     

Environmental Injustice in Argentina: Struggles against Genetically Modified Soy

This paper explores the unequal distribution of the environmental and social costs and benefits of the genetically modified (GM) soy model in Argentina and its impact on grievance formation and the emergence of contestation. In the 1990s, Argentina transitioned into a neoliberal agro‐industrial model based on producing GM soy for export. Though celebrated as a success, the expansion of GM soy monocultures has brought widespread socio‐ecological disruption. Various social actors have started to mobilize against the resulting environmental injustice. I focus on the peasant–indigenous movement in the north of the country, which is struggling for land rights, and the movements against agrochemical spraying in the central Pampas region. These groups, which are relatively powerless to control resources where they live, and that experience little or no benefit from GM soy production, nevertheless bear most of its social and ecological costs. These struggles link environmental and social well‐being, becoming struggles for ecological sustainability as well as social justice and equity.     

Factors Affecting Farmers’ Participation in Agri‐environmental Measures: A Northern Italian Perspective

Agri‐environmental measures play an important role in Italian rural areas, as shown by the financial commitment to the Rural Development programmes. However, in contrast with other European Union (EU) countries, policy‐makers still have limited experience on how farmers approach environmental incentive schemes. This paper casts new light on this issue from a northern Italian perspective. The rationale of the farmers’ decision‐making process is explored using two multinomial models. The first explains the probability of non‐participation or participation in one of three specific agri‐environmental measures. The model outcomes show that labour‐intensive farming types and high dependency of household income on farming activity constrain farmers’ participation, whereas previous experience, easy‐to‐implement environmentally friendly farm practices and adequate compensation of extra costs encourage participation. The second model explores the effect of farmers’ attitudes and beliefs on their predispositions towards participation in any of the schemes. The results highlight that, besides income factors, the farm's future in the business, and the relationship with neighbouring farmers and their opinions on environmentally friendly practices all have significant effects on adoption of agri‐environmental measures. The paper concludes by suggesting that farmers’ attitudes and beliefs, as well as the local behavioural influences, have to be taken into account when designing and communicating agri‐environmental measures.     

Russian Roulette at the Trade Table: A Specific Factors CGE Analysis of an Agri‐food Import Ban

In the summer of 2014 Russia imposed a ban on most agri‐food products from countries enforcing Ukraine‐related sanctions against Russia. We use a specific factors computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to simulate the short‐run impact of this retaliatory policy. The baseline is carefully designed to isolate the impacts of the ban on the European Union (EU), Russia itself and a selection of key trade partners. The modelling of the ban follows a novel approach, where it is treated as a loss of established trade preferences via reductions in consumer utility in the Armington import function. Not surprisingly, the results indicate that Russia bears the highest income loss (about €3.4 billion) while the EU recovers part of its lost trade through expansion of exports to other markets. An ex‐post comparison between simulation results and observed trade data reveals the model predictions to be broadly accurate, thereby validating the robustness of the modelling approach.     

Modelling Farmers’ Participation in an Agri‐environmental Scheme using Panel Data: An Application to the Rural Environment Protection Scheme in Ireland

Previous studies that have attempted to model the participation decision of farmers in agri‐environmental schemes have used a static framework where it was not possible to examine changes in the participation decision of farmers over time. This is rectified in this paper by utilising an 11‐year panel that contains information on 300 farmers for each year. The structure of this dataset allows us to employ discrete time duration random effects panel data logit models to model the determinants of entering the Irish Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS). We introduce a dynamic element into a number of the models by using the random effects logit model estimator, with lagged dependent variables as additional explanatory variables. The results point to the fact that systems of farming that are more extensive and less environmentally degrading remain those most likely to participate in the REPS. In addition, the results highlight the fact that where no attempt is made to control for unobserved heterogeneity or path dependency the effects of the farm‐ and farmer‐specific characteristics may be overestimated.     

Expert judgements and community values: preference heterogeneity for protecting river ecology in Western Australia

Western Australia's Swan River is a complex asset providing environmental, recreational and commercial benefits. Agencies responsible for its management rely extensively on advice from experts, whose preferences may or may not align with those of the community. Using a choice experiment, we compared public and expert preferences for managing the river's ecology and tested the application of budget‐reallocation and personal‐cost payment vehicles. The results indicate that the budget‐reallocation method is a suitable payment vehicle for public and expert samples, although there are some differences to the more traditional personal‐cost vehicles because of different trade‐offs involved. Modelling revealed heterogeneity in preferences. Expert and public preferences were statistically different from one another at the mean, but a significant amount of heterogeneity existed in the populations sampled. The differences in preferences across both public and expert groups suggest that the measurement of public values for the environment is still an important part of the management process, even when experts are providing advice.     

How Sure Can You Be? A Framework for Considering Delivery Uncertainty in Benefit Assessments Based on Stated Preference Methods

The economic valuation of benefits resulting from environmental policies and interventions often assumes that environmental outcomes are certain. In fact, these outcomes are typically uncertain. This article proposes a methodological approach to incorporate delivery uncertainty into benefit estimation based on stated preference methods. In the study design of a choice experiment survey on land‐based climate change mitigation, we explicitly include delivery uncertainty as the risk that a proposed mitigation project fails to deliver emission savings. We find that respondents’ preferences do not change significantly after being confronted with choices that included risk of failure. However, failure risk itself does have an important impact on the preferences for delivering emission reductions. We show that delivery uncertainty can have a large impact on stated preference estimation of benefits of public programmes. This result should condition conclusions drawn from ex‐ante environmental cost‐benefit analyses that make use of such benefit estimates.     

To Cheat or Not To Cheat: Moral Hazard and Agri‐environmental Policy

This Address examines the moral hazard problem in agri‐environmental policy. It begins with a theoretical analysis of moral hazard in this context, including the identification of eight potential causes of cheating behaviour among farmers. But is cheating behaviour among farmers actually a problem for agri‐environmental policy? And if it is, which are the statistically significant causes of concern? The answer seems to be: “we don't know” as there are currently no empirical analyses of the moral hazard problem and its causes in agri‐environmental policy. On this basis I analyse a set of policy solutions – to a problem for which we have no evidence of its causes or extent!     

Regulators’ and stakeholders’ perspectives in a framework for bioenergy development

In this study, ten bioenergy crop rotations (corn, corn-stover, sorghum, soybean, corn-soybean, corn-soybean-canola, corn-stover-soybean, miscanthus, switchgrass, and sorghum-soybean) were selected based on local stakeholder (economically motivated) and regulator (environmentally motivated) preferences. These crops were implemented on diverse landscapes (agricultural, marginal, and agricultural plus marginal lands) one at time for 17 years using a SWAT model of the Saginaw River Watershed in Michigan. The bioenergy crops were evaluated based on 100 percent, 50 percent, and zero percent weight assigned to both stakeholders’ and regulators’ preferences using analytic hierarchy process (AHP), an optimization and decision-making technique that aims to satisfy multiple conflicting objectives. The corn-soybean-canola rotation was selected in all landscapes based on economic benefits (stakeholders’ preferences). Meanwhile, perennial grasses (miscanthus and switchgrass) were selected based on environmental benefits (regulators’ preferences), because they maintain permanent cover, require fewer inputs than traditional row crops, and are less management intensive. When implementing bioenergy crops on marginal lands, pollution generation greatly increased at the field level, indicating that these lands are likely not viable for bioenergy crop production to meet potential future renewable energy demand.     

The Impacts of Elicitation Context on Stated Preferences for Agricultural Landscapes

Statements of willingness to pay (WTP) have been shown to be dependent upon the framing of the hypothetical market. In this paper we investigate the effects of variations in the timing and location of choice experiment questions concerned with conservation of a UK national park, as research involving measurement of psychological well‐being suggests potential differences for the same individual dependent upon when and where preferences are elicited. We apply the choice experiment technique to the valuation of changes in upland agricultural and semi‐natural landscapes in the Peak District National Park in the UK, to investigate whether timing and location of elicitation (context) affects the value associated with changes in ecosystem services under different management regimes. Four treatments are employed – using the same sample of individuals answering the same choice scenarios – to measure WTP ex‐ante (off site), in situ (on site), and ex‐post at two different time intervals (off site). We show that our on‐site (in situ) treatment generates very different estimates of preferences than any of the off‐site treatments. That stated preferences associated with environmental goods are so context dependent may have implications for the use of stated preferences in policy analysis in terms of identifying how environmental policy is funded and the divergence in value attributed to sampling different populations.     

Incentivising the collaborative management of mobile ecological resources

The collaborative management of mobile ecological resources across landscapes can provide many benefits at the societal level, but can also face considerable stakeholder opposition. Wild deer are one example of a range of ecological resources, whether individual species, habitats or ecosystem services, for which management at a landscape scale is likely to be far more effective than the single-site approaches favoured (and incentivised) to date. Determining the most appropriate mechanism to encourage collaboration depends on an understanding of the ecological, geographical, socio-economic and cultural contexts within which management decisions are made. In this paper, we employ a mixed-methods approach to quantify and explain UK deer managers’ preferences for different collaborative mechanisms and financial incentives, accounting for socio-economic and regional differences. We show that deer managers would regard a mandatory collaboration scheme as undesirable in the majority of regions covered in our study but that managers’ responses to proposed financial incentives for participation in mandatory collaboration were more positive in those regions where stakeholders had prior experience of existing payment schemes for modifying land use and wildlife management. Future collaboration in deer management in the UK is likely to be promoted most effectively if incorporated as part of existing environmental management schemes and in a sufficiently flexible manner to accommodate geographical and cultural contexts. Our study illustrates how mixed-methods approaches can be used to identify the opportunities and constraints associated with the wider uptake of collaboration in the management of mobile ecological resources.     

Mixed integration of individual background,attitudes and tastes for landscape management

This paper discusses the design and analysis of a choice experiment regarding preferences for possible transformations of a mountain landscape traditionally used for grazing. Visual impacts related to changing a mountain landscape associated with a new ski resort development are evaluated versus an option with less environmental impact, such as a health spa or “no development”. A multi-level latent class framework is applied to simultaneously obtain those groups of people who choose similarly and are grouped locally, but are also defined by their location, assuming that their choices are representative of what they like and would choose. Groups from the mountains are classified into one specific grand class. Some individuals who live in urban areas have attitudes and beliefs similar to those who live in the mountains, and they also are classified into that same grand class. The model also identifies seven lower-level groups of individuals, each with their own structure of preferences.