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Collaboration of multiple actors is a taken-for-granted aspect in many discussions about forest governance, while scant attention is being paid to how the more complex arrangements needed to make collaboration work come into being and develop a life of their own. The present paper argues that attention to the ways in which collaborative arrangements develop addresses the key question of authority in forest governance. It draws on empirical evidence of an implementation study after a high-profile land use decision had been made in British Columbia’s forestry sector, and zooms in on what actors do with policies, once they are agreed to. Asking which drivers for collaboration exist, what role authorities play in the overall process, and which outcomes are generated, the study finds that government inaction, deregulation and purposeful obscuring of decision-making determines collaborative governance in the making. If these dynamics take hold, the delivery of public goods from forests is put at risk.

The raison d’etre of spatial planning is to secure public benefits or goods through the regulation of private development. Under neoliberalism, where economic growth is privileged over community interests, the ability of planning to deliver public goods can be compromised. The aim of this research was to investigate the delivery of mixed communities in the regeneration of waterfront sites in two outwardly comparable, but in detail, rather different port cities, namely Plymouth and Bristol. The range of dwelling types, extent of affordable housing and associated practicalities of delivery were evaluated using planning application data, 2000–2017 and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholder groups (local planning authority [LPA] officers, developers, land agents and politicians). The results indicate that there is a standard ‘model’ of delivery for port regeneration with city centre harbour-side land yielding high density apartment developments and with houses becoming the prevelent house type in suburban waterfront locations. Planning policies for social mixing have not, in general, been successfully implemented in waterfront sites due to the greater priority afforded to development viability and the political pressure to unlock and accelerate economic growth. The exception to these findings was where public land had been used. For both cities, just two per cent of the dwellings delivered on privately procured sites were affordable housing units compared to over 25% on public land. This paper highlights the effect of neoliberalisation on the English planning system, which enables developers to acquire sites without regard to local development plan policies. Such policies allow developers and landowners to negate planning obligations to provide affordable housing to the detriment of public good and trust in the system.

International audience; The Cévennes National Park in the South of France is a major and viable example of Mediterranean ancestral agro-pastoralism that represents the relationship between agro-pastoral systems and their biophysical environment. These characteristics are recognized by a UNESCO label. Nevertheless, this medieval heritage is endangered by short-term agricultural economic strategies aiming to boost competitiveness. Our research uses Ostrom’s social-ecological systems as an analytical framework to explore systemic inter-dependencies among natural, social and economic processes which lead to the production of environmentally and socially beneficial outcomes. Our results highlight the role of the National Park and of local collective strategies in countering individual land management approaches in order to preserve agro-pastoral systems.

Open space and recreation land protection can provide a variety of community benefits. Limited government resources, however, may preclude land acquisition and enhancement activities. State governments have thus turned to “bond referenda” as a mechanism to increase financial resource capacity to provide public goods. The purpose of this study is to explore two groups of factors (resident characteristics and land use types) related to voter support for an environmental bond in the state of Rhode Island, USA. A spatial regression model is used to explore these relationships. The results show that voting districts with high-density residential land use and a non-white population are more supportive of the environmental bond referendum, as are voting districts with more open space that is publicly accessible and that have recreational amenities. Voting districts with a high percentage of natural habitat land are less supportive of the bond referendum. The findings suggest government agencies should pay more attention to the equitable distribution of public goods and to providing more open space land that is public accessible.

A failure of markets to coordinate demand with supply indicates that the transaction costs of an exchange outweigh the benefits that buyers and suppliers expect to gain from trade. As a result, some goods and services are not traded in markets, despite potential demand and prospective supply. This is the case for some environmental services that exhibit the public good and common pool resource characteristic of non-excludability caused by the prohibitive transaction costs associated with defining, defending, and trading property rights over them. Payment for Environmental Services (PES) schemes are being used in an attempt to facilitate the operation of markets. However, few PES schemes involve the ‘negotiation’ of prices based on comparable estimates of demand and supply. This paper reports on two applications of a PES scheme design that mimics market processes for traded goods and services to an extent beyond existing attempts. It demonstrates how ‘efficient’ prices for biodiversity protection can be ‘negotiated’ through agent intervention and discusses the challenges encountered in the process.

Korea had experienced rapid urbanization and population increase that resulted in a shortage of housing and ensuing poor urban living environment. While past studies have much devoted to topics that relate to government intervention in overcoming the nation’s housing shortage problem, this study examines the ways in which the Korean apartment model contributed to providing a decent living environment and outcompeting other housing types in Korea. Drawing on club theory, this study revisits market-based solutions that the Korean government devised to promote apartment-type housing and explores how they have accelerated the production and consumption of apartments and achieved an improved urban living environment. This study suggests that while the inclusion of territorial collective goods in residential development has become an effective and feasible way to enhance the overall housing environment, it has also stimulated homebuyers to prefer apartment-type housing in lieu of other housing types in Korea.

Understanding farmers’ preferences for efficiency and equity regarding different land use rights is necessary for the success of land reforms because economic efficiency with equity is the key distinguishing feature of China’s land reforms. This paper presents a comparative analysis of farmers’ preferences for tenure security (a measure of efficiency) and distribution equality in two similar but distinct land use practices: reallocating physical farmland and reallocating forest monetary shares, both of which contradict government-imposed tenure individualization policies but have long co-existed in some parts of Southeast China. The analysis includes farmers’ self-interested as well as prosocial motivations. Data from 222 households, collected from five communities using surveys and a public good game, shows that farmers have a high preference for distribution equality over tenure security in both types of land reallocations. Using bivariate probit models, we find farmers’ preferences for reallocating land property rights are associated with their prosocial preferences, but the influence of prosocial preferences varies across reallocations. Moreover, the higher cost of implementing farmland reallocations contributes to farmers’ higher preference for tenure security in farmland reallocations than in forest shareholdings reallocations. The research provides empirical evidence of the influence of prosocial motivations on farmers’ land property rights preferences and demonstrates that farmers in the same communities may have different preferences for land property rights for two land uses (agriculture and forestry), and the influencing factors and their influence on land property rights preferences may also vary across land uses.

Agriculture is an important type of land use but suffers from drought, especially under global climate change scenarios. Although government is a major actor in helping farmers to adapt to drought, lack of funds has constrained its efforts. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) mechanism has been widely applied in urban infrastructure development to raise fund for public goods and services, but very few studies explored its role in rural areas. Based on interview of 139 farming households and open-ended interview of village heads, government officials and company representatives, in the Lujiang Flatland in the Nu River (Upper Salween) Valley, Southwest China, this paper aims to reveal how PPP functions to enhance farmers' adaptation to drought. We found that farmers have developed multiple strategies in their own ways to adapt to drought, including pumping and store water, using water-saving irrigation techniques, changing of crops, and strengthening water management at the community level, while insufficient funds, water resource scarcity and mismatch of time-scale of crop growth and drought even hindered their adaptation options. Limited fund sources, gap in policy implementation and weak performance of government-funded projects hindered governmental supports to be effective. Weak motivation and distrusted by farmers limited the engagement of private enterprises in supporting farmers to adapt to drought. PPP mechanism has the potential to mobilize fund from multiple sources, share costs, risks and benefits among different stakeholders, combine both scientific and local knowledge, and reduce uncertainty through formal and informal institutions. Benefited from these advantages, PPP mechanism could improve project performance, thus increase farmers’ adaptation options and resilience to drought. This study offers referential lessons and valuable insights for agricultural development, especially for mountain communities vulnerable to exceptional and recurrent drought episodes under warming climate.

Compensating land managers for the provision of public goods is currently one of the European Union’s flagship policies, and one that that resonates across the globe more generally in the effort to meet Sustainable Development Goals. Despite having been central to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for several decades now, Agri-Environment Schemes (AES) seem to only have had limited success in preserving biodiversity and providing environmental benefits due, among other, to farmer-related factors. This paper systematically reviews and quantifies, for the first time, the body of evidence that explores these factors with respect to their influence on land managers’ willingness to accept (WTA) compensation for the delivery of biodiversity and environmental features’ protection. Our analysis shows a complex and nuanced picture. Farmers appear generally willing to enrol in AES, with average payment per hectare being around 327 Euros. However, the current evidence base provides few clues on how best that willingness is matched by contract design formats and features more generally. Providing support to farmers and exploring new ways of monitoring compliance emerge as issues worth considering as means of determining compensation in AES. Further, the broader evidence base seems to suggest that wealthier land managers stand to gain more than less wealthy in enroling in AES. However, this alone seems, in the overall, like a quite modest contribution from the body of evidence to inform policy design more broadly. It indeed does seem that we (academia and/or policy) are not yet hitting the right key on how to best match farmers preferences for enroling in AES for the delivery of biodiversity/environmental features A significant leap forward would not simply require an increased quantity of primary studies, but a deeper reflexion on how the complexity of farmers’ preferences is best captured in the design of policy instruments that have to both share common features while being adaptable to context dependent characteristics at the landscape level. This is more pressing than ever face to the unprecedented challenges of Brexit and the COVID19-induced economic recession, which is going to put every cent of public funding under the hardest of scrutinies in the years to come.

Blended finance offers a way of increasing total expenditure on tackling the twin climate and biodiversity global emergencies. However, this requires effective methods for combining private and public funding. As an example of the barriers and opportunities facing practical implementation of a blended finance approach, this Viewpoint paper presents a case-study of the UK Peatland Code which will have relevance to other instances of blended finance initiatives elsewhere. Restoration of degraded peatlands reduces their carbon emissions and can provide emission reductions and other environmental gains in a socially cost-effective manner. However, many benefits are public goods arising as externalities which are difficult to convert into financial returns to private investors. To address this problem, the Peatland Code has been developed as a voluntary certification standard for UK peatland projects wishing to seek additional private funding via the voluntary carbon market. However, uptake of the Peatland Code has been slow. Despite growing demand in the voluntary carbon market, we observe six main barriers to supply-side uptake: lack of awareness amongst land managers; resistance to land use change, particularly when measures are seen to potentially compromise agricultural production; high upfront capital costs; limited equipment and skills; uncertainty over ongoing costs and support; and, administrative bureaucracy/inflexibility. We offer recommendations for how such barriers could be reduced to increase supply-side uptake, including: increased effort to promote sustainable land management and blended financing of it, and restoration activities and the Peatland Code in particular; continued public funding of upfront capital investments, with private funding directed more at ongoing payments; and, simplified and more flexible administrative arrangements, with public and private schemes designed in tandem to improve their practical complementarity.

Generally, subsidies increase the supply of goods beyond optimal amounts, and generate deadweight losses. The urban fringes receive implicit land-rent subsidies from the governmental provision of public works and civic services paid for mostly by taxing properties, goods, and income, rather than only the land values generated by these public goods. The provision of utilities such as water is also skewed towards subsidizing the fringes. The taxation of most of the land rent or land value, combined with the elimination of other taxes, especially on improvements, would prevent such subsidies and allow development markets to generate an optimal urban development. Urban sprawl, defined as the use of land relative to optimal use, would gradually become eliminated with the elimination of both horizontal land subsidies and the taxation of vertical development. Land value taxation would also prevent distortive land speculation and, combined with a reduction of taxes on wages or goods paid from wages, would remove a major source of economic inequality while improving productivity.

High Nature Value farmland (HNVf) plays an important role in delivering biodiversity and has the capacity to deliver many important environmental public goods such as clean air, clean water, climate regulation and aesthetic landscapes. A lack of information on what exactly characterises a HNV farm is a major impediment to the application of policy supports for the conservation of HNVfs. For the first time in Ireland, the diversity of HNV farms and the characteristics that distinguish the different types from one another is described. The typology methodology employed incorporates farm-scale land cover and management data based on a national sample of HNV farms. We identified six HNVf types and describe them here; five correspond to existing broad EU HNVf types and another ‘Aggregate HNVf’, which has not been previously described. There is a clear diversity of HNVf in Ireland and this can be captured and described in a broad typology that includes selected farm structural characteristics, management variables and basic habitat attributes. Similar farm types occurred across geographically disparate parts of Ireland, indicating the need for policy supports that target each of the HNVf types rather than address specific geographic locations. The identification of ‘Aggregate HNVf’ highlights the need for HNVf to be considered at multiple scales and not at farm-scale only. This typology can facilitate better understanding of HNVf at farm-scale for policymakers and farm advisors and thereby aid the development of national policies and measures that better target, support and conserve HNV farmland. The approach developed in this study could be adapted and applied in other European countries or regions to describe the diversity of HNVf from areas with known high HNVf potential.

With the booming development of urban underground space in China, “fuzzy” property rights of this special form of land use type are not only the cause of ownership disputation and registration chaos, but also may seriously delay the undertaking of related underground land laws or regulations. China's emerging property rights issue of urban underground space, especially the delimitation of the surface and ground or underground, is facing such a challenge. This article aims to identify the property rights of urban underground space by using a practical method that classifies the underground space as economic goods, and to analyze attributes of different property rights of urban underground space within the theoretical framework of public goods. We use civil defense projects and underground parking lots as case studies. Both case studies are the most utilized types and controversial ownership cases of urban underground space in present China. Our case studies indicate that it is a feasible method to avoid the delimitation of the start-stop height of 3D property right vertically, and directly define the attributes of surface and underground property rights in line with the supply mode of goods. Our results show that the method proposed in this study can effectively solve the dispute of property rights against problems rising with unclear contract and lags in the legislation of urban underground space and clearly delimited the interests boundaries among different parties of property rights for urban underground space. Ultimately, this study may offer better insight into the utilization and registration work of urban underground space in China as well as reference for countries with similar property rights issues.

Effective agri-environmental management of peatlands requires co-ordinated implementation action beyond that on a farm level due to the ecological functioning of the water system at the watershed level. We assess how farmers perceive different co-ordinating institutions and which farm and farmers’ characteristics determine differences in the perception. We consider different institutions facilitating farm co-operation: a governmental and a more horizontal one. We apply a quantitative data analysis from a questionnaire survey including a discrete choice experiment on the willingness of peatland farmers to participate in a hypothetical agri-environmental measure targeted at climate-friendly peatland management. Results show that preferences differ across farm types and farmers’ characteristics. We find that part-time farmers and those without formal agricultural training perceive support for co-operation as beneficial, while more professional farmers (full-time, with formal agricultural training and receiving professional advice) tend to reject support for co-operation. Additionally, which institution offers support for co-operation matters. While we do not find a general pattern for or against an institution, the preferences differ across farm types and farmers’ characteristics, i.e. the professionalization.

Rural areas are where many environmental and cultural public goods occur, creating a country landscape. Their agro-ecological infrastructure delivers things people directly value, such as food, fibre and energy, but the market fails when it comes to the valuation of public goods. For this purpose, indirect valuation methods are used, but these encounter many methodological problems. The aim of this study is to create a conceptual framework for the economic rent valuation (ERV) method, which estimates the economic rent resulting from the random endogenous influences of public goods on production factors in rural areas. The ERV method attempts to reduce the biases of the market-based and contingent valuation methods that result from the model misspecification and unrevealed preferences, and advocates for adoption of the variance component model. The article also presents an illustrative application of ERV based on the case of the West Pomeranian region of Poland, which reveals the potential advantages of ERV.

Several non-governmental initiatives have emerged in the Czech Republic in recent years with the aim to organise the provision of public goods or ecosystem services from agriculture and forestry. These initiatives are usually started by activists (elites) and take forms such as foundations or trust funds, but often present themselves as collective actions of communal interests. This paper sets out to present four cases of such efforts and to show their common and contrasting features in light of their relevance to local needs and possible integration in the future CAP framework. A particular focus is on the community-based character of these initiatives for the provision of public goods. This is done by examining the necessary conditions for the success of collectively managed common pool resources. The research shows that elite-driven non-governmental organisations often emerge because of a lack of interest on the part of public bodies and because local communities do not have the capacity to set up a collective action for the provision of environmentally and socially “beneficial outcomes” (ESBO). The investigated NGOs, however, soon came into conflict with non-involved actors. To improve the governance mechanism, an extension towards a community-based collective action is proposed. However, each step of such a transition is a challenge for the initiatives of the presented case studies. The first critical issue is to find a common interest among actors. Similarly, “sharing power” represents a struggle which consequently delays progress in creating effective internal governance. The difficulty in progressing towards community-based collective action is amplified by the uncertainty concerning property rights induced by the activities of the NGOs and unfavourable socioeconomic and institutional conditions. Finding that the private initiatives are far from being able to transform into community-based collective action, we propose to launch a measure of institutional funding for the coordination and management of their projects – similar to LEADER but more concentrated in scope.

The mixture of public goods that arise from rural land is shaped by multiple policy instruments, such as regulations and economic incentives. Whilst there is a vast literature focusing on categories of policy instruments, there remains the need for a deeper exploration of the interaction between these instruments and the consequences for managing public goods in agricultural and/or forested landscapes. Therefore, we explore how policy instruments influence the mix of public goods provided by Scottish agricultural and forested areas, drawing on desk based and empirical research. Our data suggest that whilst environmental policy instruments in Scotland are designed to coordinate – i.e. not to conflict – with each other, the design and implementation of instruments often go beyond this. We find that many instruments are hybrid and/or rely on interactions with other instrument types (interdependency) to achieve their objectives. This seems well understood by those involved in the implementation of policy instruments. In light of these results, we argue that the literature about types of policy instruments must evolve to explicitly acknowledge interdependency and hybridity: these concepts can become starting points for understanding how public goods can be governed in a more systemic way. Our work also draws attention to the need to study policy instruments ‘on the ground’ in order to understand their role and use in the wider debates about new environmental governance. Finally, while the idea of interdependency and hybridity brings challenges and even resistance by some who design policy, it may also help to overcome the existing policy implementation deficit between the aims and achievements of environmental policies.

Results-oriented approaches are widely regarded as an effective means to improving cost-effectiveness of agri-climate-environment schemes. We designed a hypothetical payment-by-results scheme for biodiversity conservation on environmental grasslands in Finland. The scheme would pay farmers a premium if the site contains a set number of indicator species, which were selected based on vascular plant surveys of the target habitat type. We presented the hypothetical scheme to 20 farmers and six experts (researchers, officials and advisors) in agricultural policy for their opinions on the payment-by-result approach generally and the hypothetical scheme specifically. The indicator species list proved suitable for identifying sites with high total species richness of vascular plants and also appeared feasible in the eyes of the farmers. Farmers were mostly positive about the approach and, mainly, thought their peers and society at large would receive it positively. The main concerns were about implementation, especially verifying the biodiversity results. People working for the national control body were the most critical and could not see how the hypothetical scheme could fit into the current institutionalised programme. Experience in other countries may provide solutions for overcoming such obstacles. The results are highly relevant for a discourse on social experimentation and cost-efficient delivery of public goods for public money.

Public lands such as state parks provide numerous environmental, economic, and cultural benefits. Many of these benefits possess public goods characteristics and are not traded in market, making it difficult to incorporate them in a traditional economic analysis. Agencies responsible for managing public parks often struggle with demonstrating amenity benefits. Consequentially, many state parks in the U.S. are facing reductions in operating hours and in some cases permanent closure. Using the case of Indian Springs State park in Georgia, U.S, this study compares the economic returns of using the area as a recreation park with the alternative land use option of timber production. Lost timber sale revenues were estimated using a timber investment model. The results reveal that if only revenue and operating costs associated with the current land use (i.e., recreation) are considered, the best financial option is to utilize the area for timber production. However, the total economic benefits of using this land as a state park exceeded the operating costs of park by a factor of ten. Furthermore, the ratio ranged from 8.86 to 9.74, even when foregone opportunity costs of timber production were considered in benefit-cost analysis. These results provide further evidence of the net benefit of public recreation lands, and will help managers justify investments in operating and maintaining such resources.

A relatively recent body of literature has looked critically at the role of car parking in urban areas, showing that a significant determinant of the extent of parking space is the planning system. Of particular importance are statutory minimum off-street parking requirements for new developments. If parking and parking policies are significant to urban outcomes, one question that follows is − how active a role (if any) has strategic urban planning had in car parking? In this paper we ask if, and in what ways, car parking has been a stated strategic planning interest over the course of nearly a century of planning for one city − Melbourne, Australia. Our approach has three parts: a content analysis of strategic planning documents over time; a corresponding analysis of statutory policies on the ground; and reflection on what this means for the relationships between strategy and policy. We find that extensive car parking, treated as a public good, was once specifically planned as a critical component of facilitating a car-based city. We show that car parking has receded as a strategic policy issue over time, but that statutory minimum parking requirements introduced in the 1950s continue to be entrenched. Even with more recent strategic plans seeking to curtail car use and increase urban densities, minimum parking policies originally introduced to achieve the opposite effects have remained largely intact. We argue that parking has a significant role in urban form but is, in our case study city, illustrative of gaps between strategic and statutory planning, and between planning practice and research. Whereas post-war planning instigated policy approaches to car parking as a means of planning for car use, strategic planning in Melbourne now plans around parking − the elephant in the scheme. The findings have implications for other intensifying cities with a history of minimum parking policies; as well as for cities now undergoing rapid motorisation.

The Special Zones of Social Interest (Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social – ZEIS) are urban areas specifically earmarked under municipal law for social housing purposes. ZEIS maps demarcated under Sao Paulo city’s Master Plans – 2002 and 2014 – were examined to quantify the changes over the years and to provide starting point data to evaluate of the limits and the possibilities for further socioeconomic and legal analysis. The zoning impacts were assessed by numeric and cartographic comparison using the available socioeconomic maps and reports produced by the municipality. A post-occupation (a posteriori) zoning (ZEIS type 1 representing 9.4% of municipal area) followed the expansion of the informal settlements, thus providing a first step for assessing the land tenure, while a pre-occupation (a priori) zoning (ZEIS types 2, 3, 4 and 5 representing 2.3% of municipal area) is an important measure for designating land for social housing purposes, even if they do maintain the segregated occupation pattern on the periphery. Upgrading programs have been disappointing, considering the amount of informally occupied land; similarly, property regularization in the land registry offices reveals a lack of political priority and rare provision of public goods and amenities. For vacant land, determining the social function of property remains a challenge because less than 10% of land use intended for social housing projects was implemented as planned. Housing deficit and inequality remain as complex problems. Obviously ZEIS as a zoning tool is still unable to make the fairest occupation processes possible, not being an isolated solution, but if it is used correctly with other innovative measures and housing solutions, satisfactory results can be achieved.

Nature provides a wide range of ecosystem services (ES) that are vital for human well-being and livelihoods. The supply of these services is being threatened by local and global pressures. Managing for the provision of ES can provide a range of benefits that, in economic terms, can be defined as, private, common or public goods. Inspired by the theme ⿿local action for the common good⿿ of 7th Ecosystem Service Partnership conference held in Costa Rica, this paper examines the key issues in policy and management for production and management of ES in a way that meet the broader common good. The ES approach is not widely understood by policymakers, the general public and the private sector. While the approach is a promising contribution to providing for common good outcomes from the management of natural resources, much needs to be done to ensure that it achieves the dual purposes of maintaining and enhancing the supply of different services and improving the livelihoods of the rural poor in developing countries. Critical areas for further attention are assessments of ecosystem services in developing countries that incorporate local and indigenous knowledge, clear links to policy and decision making, public education and engagement about the value of ecosystem services and payment mechanisms that drive local actions and contribute to local livelihoods.

Much of the housing in China’s cities built since the opening up of housing markets in the 1990s is organized in residential clubs, with neighbourhood civic goods and services constructed by private developers, financed by residents’ fees, managed by property-management companies and governed by resident associations. This means that there are now three important types of green space in Chinese cities: public green space (open-access parks), private green space (gardens, exclusive to a private home) and club green space (greenery exclusive to fee-paying estate residents). We ask a simple but profound question: how does this three-fold green space morphology and economy influence housing prices and, by implication, locational preferences in the city? More specifically, we test the hypothesis that the privately supplied green spaces withing club-communities substitute for publicly supplied green spaces in the public realm. We find evidence in support of this hypothesis, showing for example, that unlike other kinds of green space, public district parks have no measurable use value to Shanghai home-buyers, using a hedonic valuation model. If urban planners in China understood that their cities have become ‘cities of clubs’, then they would plan open space differently and scarce public funds could be redirected to other public goods and services with measurable demand.

Agricultural landscapes deliver multiple, highly valued goods such as cultural amenities, biodiversity conservation and climate stability. These goods are often delivered as side-effects of farmers' production decisions driven by broad-scale, supranational changes in agricultural, trade or other policies. Human well-being is thus affected in ways not taken into account in these macro-policy decisions. To avoid this policy failure, there is a growing demand for the valuation of broad-scale changes in public goods by the general public. For this purpose, context-rich valuation scenarios at this broad scale need to be developed which are empirically-based, policy-relevant and understandable by the general public. In this way, respondents are focused on actual trade-offs rather than invited to give symbolic reactions. This paper presents and discusses a valuation framework developed to fulfil these criteria. The approach is based on a typology of Macro-Regional Agri-Environmental Problems (MRAEP). Each MRAEP is defined by: (1) prevailing farming systems and agricultural landscapes; (2) current levels of public-good delivery; (3) expected direction of land-use change; and (4) expected effects of such change on public-good provision in each macro-region. Multivariate analysis of EU-wide data on agricultural landscapes and farming-systems led to identify thirteen macro-regions in the EU. Current public-good provision was described using public-good indicators. Only those public goods that are expected to change or could be improved by available policy options (core public goods) were used to generate choice alternatives for survey respondents. The paper ends by discussing innovative elements in the proposed approach, achievements, shortcomings and possible policy uses.

Livestock production is under increasing scrutiny regarding its impacts on the environment and its wider role in climate change. Consequently, there are a growing number of private agri-environmental schemes (AES) now operating alongside public AES that offer farmers economic rewards to maintain and enhance the environment. This study focused exclusively on a small number of commercial dairy producers located in the North West of England who were all suppliers of a global food producer and members of the producer’s own private AES. The study explored the economic and societal drivers of adoption of agri-environmental behaviours and perceptions of the private processor AES. The study adopted a mixed-method approach. In Stage 1 a structured questionnaire was used to explore the role of an AES offered by the global food processor in the financial stability and environmental sustainability of dairy farms (n = 20). The survey sought to understand the range of interventions adopted, explore future adoption intentions and identify possible ways in which AESs could be extended. The results from the questionnaire were explored further in Stage 2, through qualitative in-depth interviews (n = 12). A thematic analysis approach was taken to describe the key themes that motivated farmer engagement in agri-environmental schemes. Overall, farmers felt that income from the private AES provided stability and resilience to their businesses, permitting them to have greater confidence in business planning and budgeting for the upcoming year. The majority of the farmers were not part of a public AES, but were already undertaking some agri-environmental behaviours and were motivated to join the private scheme primarily by financial incentives and by a desire to maintain the natural environment. A minority of respondents identified that the financial incentives offered had directly motivated a behaviour change. Decisions over which agri-environmental behaviours to adopt were driven by the existing animal management practices, geography and landscape of the farm. Farmers compared the private scheme favourably to available public AESs, which they perceived as more restrictive and providing insufficient reward for the “red tape” involved. In contrast, private scheme membership was perceived to have been beneficial for both their farm business and the local environment, and many reported personal satisfaction from engagement in agri-environmental behaviours. It is important that the design of future public AES does not “crowd out” private schemes, giving farmers increasing AES choice and increasing the overall amount of funding available for the delivery of public goods from agriculture.

When designing structural reforms for rural areas, the regional dimension is crucial. This study implemented a multi-directional efficiency approach in a regional, rural development context with the aim of analysing the regional efficiency of agricultural resources. The efficiency patterns of each input and output were observed over three Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) periods (1998-2013). Efficiency of labour, assets and diversified output vary the most. Over the CAP periods, the efficiency gap across the counties decreases, indicating that changes in the policy help for regions cohesion. Future policies should keep compensating for generation of public goods, and creating opportunities for diversification.

Hitherto research by planning researchers on the economics of land use planning have sought to interpret and re-interpret the role of such planning as a non-market measure to: (a) remedy market failure; (b) delineate and re-delineate property rights to land; and (c) determine the economic impact (effectiveness) of (a) and (b) on, say, efficiency (welfare), property values, and development. This paper develops the thesis from a neo-institutional economic perspective that the land use planning process is not just an indicative exercise of plan preparation, promulgation, and interpretation, but also a real production and consumption process. The former for laying out or platting a greenfield site is explained by elaborating on the analogy of cutting a diamond, while the latter is explained in terms of the physical features of public goods other than being informational. It then proceeds to how a formal de jure layout imposed by the state as a kind of corrective for an antecedent bottom-up (and in this sense “spontaneous”) de facto pre-existing layout constrains subsequent development of a place. Three Taiwanese examples are used to show how pre-existing ‘cuts’, to places that varied in terms of population and modernity, may constrain and survive subsequent cuts that seek to modernize and reform the former. Reasons based on transaction costs are offered for the key observations.

Less Favoured Areas (LFA) were designated to support farming activity on land with limited productive potential. However, progressive land abandonment in these areas questions the rationale and targeting of support payments to maintain viable farming enterprises. Using micro level data on farm businesses over the period 2003-2016 matched to land capability and spatial data we identify the distribution of viable and vulnerable enterprises in Less Favoured Areas. We find five categories of household based on progressive quality of life thresholds, namely i. vulnerable, ii. sustainable, iii. viable, iv. resilient, and v. robust. A proportional odds model measured the effect of biophysical and remote disadvantage on predicting these states of viability, along with farm family lifecycle factors. Whilst we would expect higher proportions of disadvantaged farmland to be negatively related to viability, when combined with rural remoteness this increases the magnitude of the effect. However, clear succession planning and tenancy arrangements suggest that approaches to management of the business and the farm family life-cycle may overcome some of these disadvantages. These results have to be considered against the UK’s planned withdrawal from the Common Agricultural Policy. This offers opportunities to provide a more nuanced approach to targeting and supporting disadvantaged regions beyond current criteria. However, there would seem to be dissonance between the proposed payment for public goods agenda, which is results orientated, and support for correcting natural disadvantages where opportunities for delivery of these public goods will be limited.

The present paper describes a project-based governance approach for public goods provision in the domain of land administration, which is a new decentralized structure within the traditional centralized system in China. Project-based governance represents a new relationship between the central and local governments that aims to cooperatively provide land-related services for public interest projects. The top–down project allocation from the central government and the bottom–up project packaging by local governments together successfully improve the incentives of the local governments and, therefore, achieve the central government’s aim of providing public goods and fostering economic development. We use Fujian Province of China as an example to show the operational process of the project-based governance approach, and we discuss in detail the features and potential effects of the new governance system. The paper may provide new evidence for governance innovation regarding decentralization in a traditionally centralized system.

In this paper, we analyse Norwegian farmers’ perspectives on the meaning of working in agriculture, their attitudes towards various aspects of multifunctional agriculture (MFA) and land use, and their evaluation of different forms of agricultural payments. The paper presents two linked studies, one Likert scale survey and one sub-sample Q-study. The Likert scale survey results show that the respondents identify themselves as producing not only high-quality food, but also public goods such as cultural landscapes and cultural heritage. Income maximisation is less important with respect to the self-identity for the respondents. The sub-sample Q-study identified two distinct perspectives of interest to the discussion about MFA policy. Perspective 1 farmers attach priority to fair income, food production and payment for food production as opposed to payments for public goods and income support. Perspective 2 farmers emphasise the importance of producing cultural landscapes, but have no strong preferences regarding the form of payments. The latter view is predominantly held by part-time farmers. The quality of the local landscape as valued by the local community had no effect on the perspectives farmers held. Our study reveals that fully replacing commodity price support with payments for public good production, or income support, is problematic for a substantial group of farmers, who would find farming to be less meaningful for them.

The estimation of wetlands’ non-use values to build up a total economic evaluation can be based on stated preference methods, which derives from the standard economic model that assumes a rational assessment of the consequence of preferences on personal utility. The paper describes the nature of the citizens’ shared ecological knowledge of wetlands functions, the relation of the shared ecological knowledge with the official/normative knowledge, and the relation between the motivations outlined by the shared ecological knowledge and those expected by the standard economic model. The results demonstrate that economic preferences are driven by multiple motivations well rooted in the social nature of shared ecological knowledge, and not by simply consequential motivations. In this case study, social knowledge of wetlands’ ecological functions is proportionally related to people's living proximity to those wetlands. Unexpectedly, shared ecological knowledge of historically well-known and critically important services, like the hydraulic and hydrologic services, has also been diminishing. Furthermore, there is a partial or clear-cut separation between official/normative knowledge and the shared ecological knowledge on crucial aspects like wetlands’ climate change role. This approach helps to construct a motivational framework to derive values that are useful as long as they allow accounting for a complex socio-cultural capital in the public decision making process.

The growing demand for a wide range of private and public goods and services from a finite land resource is increasingly challenging for planners at local, regional, national and international scales. The Scottish Government's development of a Land Use Strategy has given salience to resolving conflicts and enhancing synergies in land use. In Scotland, the poorest quality farmland is often designated for nature and landscape conservation and the highest quality farmland often protected for food production. This means that many of the competitive pressures on land are experienced in what we term the ‘squeezed middle’. The paper identifies the multiple (and not exclusively economic) drivers of land use choices and, through an ecosystem services lens, explores three particular areas of land use conflict. These are (i) the continued high level of public support for farming, which has done little to address the problem of low farm incomes; (ii) the pressure to increase woodland planting on farm (and other) land; and (iii) conflicts associated with intensive game management, especially on sporting estates. Using the Scottish situation as an example, the heterogeneity of land use pressures means that there is a danger of the principles of the Land Use Strategy becoming lost in translation from national policy to practical land use decision-making. The appropriate scale for delivery of integrated ecosystem services may therefore be more local than current pilot projects, and may require more active participation of land managers. It may also require policy instruments that are more flexible in adapting to the local context, including payments for ecosystem services.

Using separate nationally representative surveys, this study compared the views and perspectives of farmers towards agricultural related conservation issues with that of the general public. Results suggest that both the general public and farmers expressed similar levels of concern regarding the environment as a whole. This is an encouraging sign when it comes to environmental protection, as it indicates a certain level of agreement between farmers as the group whose activities largely shape the quality of the rural environment, with the views of the general public who are the major consumers of landscape related environmental public goods. The analysis did, however, reveal important differences in attitudes in relation to certain environmental issues such as the relative importance of maintaining wildlife and habitats and having wild flora and fauna in the countryside. These activities could be seen as in conflict with farmers' productivist attitudes. We found no significant difference in environmental attitudes between farmers who have participated in voluntary agri-environmental schemes and those who did not. Results also suggest that there is significant heterogeneity in public attitudes towards environmental issues. Specifically, age, income, place of residence and presence of children were all significantly associated with environmental preferences. The study concludes that consideration needs to be given to the different views and perspectives of farmers and the general public in formulating policy aimed at providing an optimal mix of agricultural related environmental public goods and services.

Analysis of the joint production of private and public goods (PGs) by farming activities is a fertile research field. These joint production processes are typically characterised by a high level of complexity derived from the intense relationship between the production of both kinds of outputs. An integrated approach is strongly recommended for the study of the provision of agricultural PGs and the design of public intervention in this sector. Here, we propose a theoretical framework to apply an integrated approach using the analytic network process (ANP) to analyse the production of PGs by agricultural systems to support public decision-making concerning the design and implementation of agricultural policies. We introduce a novel approach in applying ANP along both directions of the influences among elements, allowing us to identify the most influenced PGs and the farmers’ most influential decisions. This methodological approach is empirically applied to a particular farming system: the irrigated olive groves (IOG) of Southern Spain. Results show that the PGs most influenced by olive growers’ decisions are soil fertility, the visual quality of agricultural landscapes and farmland biodiversity. In addition, the most influential factors affecting the provision of PGs are the structural ones, namely farm size and tree density, and, to a lesser extent, management factors dealing with fertilisation, soil and irrigation management. These results are useful for supporting agricultural policy decision-making to enhance adequate management of this farming system regarding PGs production.

In 2011 Indonesia decreed a moratorium on forest licenses over 69 million hectares (Mha) in order to suspend haphazard forest exploitation. However, only ∼12–22 Mha were actually afforded new protection from licensing. Herein I observe a further 5.5 Mha of moratorium area overlapping forest licenses and therefore subject to excisement from the moratorium. These 5.5 Mha, like the 4.5 Mha excised from the moratorium to date, are not readily explicable outside of small government committees. This highlights the quasi-transparency of the mapping process: the moratorium map is widely disseminated, yet its base data and decisions made on their basis are guarded. Implementing ministries seek to comply with reforms while simultaneously protecting their administrations from upset – an ultimately compromised position with tangible implications. This has undermined acceptance by the inherently sceptical Indonesian conservation community; yet its highly critical ‘watch dog’ role has ironically contributed by heightening government wariness. The way out of this dynamic is for the ministries to render all data public and, critically, be prepared to weather the inevitable wave of data-fuelled attack for the public good.

Plantations are expanding in many parts of the world, often accompanied by public debate. If policy makers and plantation managers seek to better align land use policy with social values and to reduce social conflict, they require a clear understanding of public expectations of land use, and the kinds of plantations that are socially acceptable. This paper presents results of a large postal survey (n = 2167) conducted in two regions of southern Australia. Residents of Tasmania and southwest Western Australia reported their acceptance of a range of plantations characterised with regard to factors such as type of product, location and size of plantation and ownership. Participants also indicated their beliefs about the impacts of commercial eucalypt plantations. The results showed that participants generally prioritised public good outcomes over individual gains from rural land use, and tended to view plantations as providing more benefits for owners than positive outcomes for the environment or the broader community. Plantations were more acceptable when grown for timber rather than pulp, when planted in areas with good water availability and poorer soils, when planted on part of a property rather than a whole property, and when owned by an individual landholder rather than a plantation company. Results are interpreted to highlight the implications for plantation policy and management in the Australian context, and to illustrate how social research can inform these practices.

Social infrastructure is essential for meeting the basic social needs of residents and improving their quality of life. Since the establishment of the Land Use Rights system, China has adopted a land financing scheme under which the LURs conveyance fees generated from land supply for profitable use is the major resource of local revenue, while land supply for social infrastructure has somewhat been overlooked. Based on a 10-year (2007 to 2016) panel data, this study analyses the spatio-temporal characteristics of land supply for social infrastructure in China. Taking 285 prefecture-level cities as the case study, it analyses the local governments’ motivation in supplying land of social infrastructure. The results of double fixed-effect regression model show that the motivation of local governments is leasing more residential land to earn land revenue rather than strengthening areas of weakness in public goods. This study concludes with implications for improving land supply policies for social infrastructure.

This study relates to the Mackenzie Basin case study in New Zealand that exhibits many characteristics of public goods that requires government involvement and covers issues of efficient resource allocation decision-making between irrigation and conservation development in the basin. Many parties have different views on the proposed irrigation project and the policy debate was about whether to support the irrigation given that there are some environmental losses or to support further conservation programmes that forgo economic growth or leave the basin unchanged. The main objective of this paper was to evaluate environmental and social factors associated with irrigation and conservation development in the basin. The study applies choice experiment method by modelling realistic choice processes in ways that frame the issues of Mackenzie Basin within competing substitutes which have opposite environmental outcomes. This framing required an alternative specific experimental design for constructing the choice sets that allow respondents to consider the substitution effects directly giving them a more realistic decision-making context. This approach was compared with the traditional generic design to observe differences in terms of model parameters and willingness-to-pay (WTP) distributions. The results show that the alternative specific design has better predictive power in terms of statistical as well as behavioural interpretation.

Agri-environmental schemes designed to induce agricultural producers to provide environmental public goods must increasingly justify exchequer costs. This requires comparing the non-market value of amenity externalities with government expenditures. We employ a preference calibrated micro-simulation model to analyze the economic viability of a grass roots agri-environment scheme in the West of Ireland. We also simulate the land-use response of individual producers to variations in program funding and market conditions. Our results indicate that heterogeneous preferences crucially influence producers’ decisions to provide environmental public goods; producers are highly sensitive to market and policy incentives, in particular to semi-organic product price premia, off-farm labor market conditions, and subsidy payments; and finally, even in the most unfavorable simulated market conditions, support payments provide a rate of return exceeding 71% and in current conditions provide returns as high as 185%.

Biodiversity, cultural heritage, and scenery are major public goods produced in the agricultural landscape. Theoretically, Indicator-based Agri-Environmental Payments have the properties of providing socially efficient production. A system of seven composite state indicators, expressing the public goods of the respective fields or field elements, was developed and tested to assess if the model worked in practical policy implementation. The evaluation indicated a more efficient resource allocation, better dynamic incentives and lower transaction costs, compared to the current Swedish payment programs. A disadvantage is that such value-differentiated payments do not comply with tailoring and with present WTO- or CAP-regulations of cost-based payments.

The objective of this paper is to examine the value of experiments for assessing the impact of the proposed Common Agricultural Policy of 2013 on farm income and farming strategies. We focus specifically on the impact of an alternative direct payment system based on a flat rate and green payments. We show the added value of an economic simulation experiment to existing economic micro- and sector modeling analysis when analyzing farmer behavior. It is shown that the suitability of and rewards for the provision of green services play a significant role in their uptake by farmers and the support for them. These results are useful in implementing a revised direct payments system in the Netherlands for the future.

This article uses research interviews, field research, and critical stakeholder analysis to identify the relevant actors and institutions involved in the Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline (TAGP) Network, a proposed multibillion dollar energy project in Southeast Asia. Based on more than 100 interviews at government institutions, multilateral development banks, universities, consulting firms, energy companies, and nongovernmental organizations, along with field research in Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, the article traces the interests, resources, and agendas involved with TAGP stakeholders. The article finds points of conflict between stakeholders as well as motivations for convergence and cooperation. The article provides insight into whether private interests will trump the public good potential of the TAGP, and also critically questions the efficacy of multilateral coordination on energy issues within Southeast Asia.

Economics is about problems of choice. In erosion control, both public authorities and private land users are faced with such problems. What is the impact of erosion, both on-site and off-site, and to what extent can this impact be quantified? If we conceptualize this impact in terms of sustainability, how can we compare one type of effect against another? The former question can be answered only by natural scientists, the latter by economists and other social scientists. Weighing different aspects of sustainability requires value judgments, and economists are sometimes accused of having a jaundiced view of reality, wrongly supposing that decisions are based on rationality and denying the importance of emotion. However, let us assume that there is some mileage to be gained out of attempting to estimate the cost of erosion in an economic sense—which consists of converting the various effects into a common denominator: euros. If we can predict the impact of erosion control measures on erosion rates, we can know the benefit of these measures. The cost also needs to be calculated, not in terms of money but in terms of resources expended (which could have been used for other purposes) and in terms of possible negative impacts of erosion control (for instance, increased use of herbicides in reduced-tillage systems). There are important other considerations which economists may study. Firstly, there is the comparison of present versus future costs and benefits: how much can we sacrifice today for higher sustainability tomorrow? Secondly, there is the issue of private versus public costs and benefits: how do the goals of private land users differ from (those of?) the public good, how can this help us to predict land users’ behaviour, and what incentives would be appropriate to make them behave in such a way as to maximize the public good? Thirdly, how do we deal with uncertainty and risk? These problems loomed large in a study to support an extended impact assessment for the EU Soil Thematic Strategy, in 2005. Whereas much research has been done on erosion and its impact, much of this is on a small scale. The extent of the problem on a national, let alone a continental or a global scale, is still poorly known. The paper discusses how these problems were faced, which is not the same as saying they were resolved.

Theoretical urban policy literature predicts the likelihood of free riding in the management of common goods such as forested open space; such outcome is often characterized as a Prisoner's Dilemma game. Numerous cases exist in which neighboring jurisdictions cooperate to maintain public goods, challenging the expected results, yet theoretical explanations of these cases have not been fully developed. In this paper, we use an agent-based model to explore how underlying micro-behaviors affect the payoffs obtained by two neighboring municipalities in a hypothetical exurban area. Payoffs are measured in terms of regional forested space and of local tax revenue at the end of the agent-based simulations; the municipalities affect these payoffs through their choice of residential zoning policies and the spillover effect between the neighboring jurisdictions. Zoning restrictions influence the conversion of farmland into residential subdivisions of different types, and consequently the location of heterogeneous residential households in the region. Developers and residents respond to the changing landscape characteristics, thus establishing a feedback between early and future land-use patterns. The structure of the simulated payoffs is analyzed using standard game theory. Our analysis shows that a variety of games, in addition to Prisoner's Dilemma, can emerge between the neighboring jurisdictions. Other games encourage coordination or subsidization, offering some explanations for the unexpected observations. The game realized in any given context depends on the initial characteristics of the landscape, the value given to the objectives each township seeks to maximize, and the income distribution of the population.

Local conservation efforts are often related to benefits at higher governmental levels. On the one hand, these efforts are strongly connected to local land-use decisions. On the other hand, activities such as sustainable water management or biodiversity conservation are associated with regional, national or even global public goods. Therefore, spatial externalities or spillovers exist, which—if not adequately compensated for—lead to an underprovision of the public goods and services concerned. This article investigates intergovernmental fiscal transfers as an innovative instrument for compensating local jurisdictions for the ecological goods and services they provide across local boundaries. From a public finance perspective, fiscal transfers are a suitable instrument for internalising spatial externalities. However, most federal states use this instrument predominantly for social and economic public sector functions rather than for ecological ones. This article investigates the case of the ecological “ICMS” that was first introduced by a few states in Brazil during the 1990s. Part of the revenue from this value-added tax is redistributed to the local level on the basis of ecological indicators. In this way, the state level uses fiscal transfers to compensate municipalities for the existence of protected areas and other ecological services provided within their territories. The Brazilian experience illustrates that such fiscal transfers can represent both a compensation for land-use restrictions and an incentive to value and engage in more conservation activities at the local level.

For almost two decades, institutional analysts have been struggling to distinguish clearly between institutional factors like property rights and the properties of the resources that are governed by such institutional arrangements. Institutions are regarded as man-made social constructions that regulate the relations between humans themselves with regard to the use of certain resources, while the biophysical attributes of a particular resource are considered given and unaffected by the institutional arrangements. This paper takes this distinction as a point of departure and takes a closer look at the complexities introduced into institutional analysis with the advance of new paradigms for governing resources—such as governing by environmental objectives and indicators, biodiversity governance, adaptive ecosystem management, etc.—and points to some of the institutional changes that this involves. In doing so, it re-examines some of the dichotomous conventions regarding the ‘nature of goods’ in light of increased attention given to ecosystem properties.

In 18 East German municipalities, nine of them with a planned pig production site and the other nine with an existing pig production site, a survey was carried out on the factors influencing the acceptance of pig production. The influencing factors examined were the personal attitude on particular aspects of pig production, socio-demographic characteristics, the personal involvement in local decision-making, the size of livestock and the production technology. As a result, existing production sites are perceived more positively than planned sites, without any influence of size and production technology. The difference may be explained by the fact that planned sites are evaluated in respect to economic arguments as jobs and income (market goods), while existing sites are rather evaluated in respect to environmental factors (public goods). For new investments the results lead to the recommendation to emphasise its economic aspects, to integrate the investor socially in the rural community and to apply technology that prevents pollution for the neighbourhood. More importantly, the results show the shortcomings of a “top down” approach and the indispensability of endogenous resources in regional development.

China has launched a series of land policy reforms to improve land-use efficiency, to rationalize land allocation, to enhance land management, and to coordinate urban and rural development. These land policy reforms have yielded positive impacts on urban land use as well as negative socioeconomic consequences. On the positive side, they have contributed to emerging land markets, increased government revenue for the financing of massive infrastructure projects and provision of public goods, and improved the rationalization of land use. On the negative side, problems such as loss of social equity, socioeconomic conflicts, and government corruption have emerged. This paper reviews China's land policy reform in a historical context and then examines the impacts on urban development and land use. Policy implications are discussed at the end.

This paper considers public goods and/or economic externalities (off-site and off-market effects) of Mediterranean forests, referred as MEDFOREXs. It also reports possible market failures and/or distortions. MEDFOREX can be valued in monetary terms as already undertaken in several Mediterranean forest sites. Multifunctional indicators are also being developed. Policy tools aimed at promotion of positive MEDFOREX, and prevention of negative ones, can be classified as mandatory or voluntary. Mandatory tools have been much used in the Mediterranean context, and now represent the core of forest policies. More recently financial or economic tools, mainly based on payments, and internalisation of externalities, have emerged. Also market options are now envisaged and applied as shown by recent surveys. Policy effectiveness is improved by the use of a combined set of tools. The most appropriate mix has not yet been formalised and this represents a policy challenge.