Protected area, easement, and rental contract data reveal five communities of land protection in the United States

Costs in conservation: Common costly mistakes and how to avoid them

There has been an increasingly prevalent message that data regarding costs must be included in conservation planning activities to make cost-efficient decisions. Despite the growing acceptance that socioeconomic context is critical to conservation success, the approaches to embedded economic and financial considerations into planning have not significantly evolved. Inappropriate cost data is frequently included in decisions, with the potential of compromising biodiversity and social outcomes. For each conservation planning step, this essay details common mistakes made when considering costs, proposing solutions to enable conservation managers to know when and how to include costs. Appropriate use of high-quality cost data obtained at the right scale will improve decision-making and ultimately avoid costly mistakes.

Institutional analysis of actors involved in the governance of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes

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19 cases of result-based, collective, land tenure and value chain contracts from six countries are analyzed.

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Innovative contracts involve a higher number and more diverse actors than mainstream agri-environmental and climate schemes.

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Actors perform 16 critical roles in contract governance, often sharing or taking on several roles.

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(Non-)Performance of roles can potentially affect contracts’ environmental effectiveness.

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Which actors take on which role is context-dependent.

In this study, we used institutional analysis to investigate the design of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes. The aim of such contracts is to better incentivize farmers for the provision of environmental public goods in comparison to current ‘mainstream’ contracts. For the analysis, we differentiated four contract types: result-based, collective, land tenure, and value chain contracts. To represent each type in the analysis, we selected 19 case examples from six European countries. Cases were identified through a mix of methods, combining literature review, web search, and expert consultation. After a structured data collection based on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, we focused our analysis on the involved actors and their roles in contract governance. Our results highlight the great diversity of public, private, and civil actors involved from the local, regional, national or international governance level, each performing one or several critical roles in contract governance. We found that it is highly context-dependent which actors assume certain roles. We also discuss how provision of environmental public goods through the contracts might potentially be impacted by certain roles and their assignment to specific actors.