Cooperative Management of Ecosystem Services: Coalition Formation, Landscape Structure and Policies

Abstract

A growing body of literature shows that full-cooperation among farmers to manage productive ecosystem services would yield gains with respect to uncoordinated approaches. The public good feature of these ecosystem services may, however, hinder the emergence of a cooperative solution at the landscape scale. In this paper, we introduce in a coalition formation game a spatially-explicit bioeconomic model of fruit pollination, where pollinaton depends on the distance to the choosen location of natural habitats. We analyse: (i) which coalitions are stable; (ii) what benefits they provide; (iii) how cooperation depends on the initial landscape structure; and (iv) how policy instruments affect cooperation. The theoretical model presents the rationality of cooperation but, due to the detailed heterogeneity and complex spatial interactions among farms, we use a numerical example to determine the stable coalitions. We find that only small coalitions are stable and that the benefits of cooperation decrease when the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase. Policy instruments can increase the interest for cooperation but per-hectare payments and minimum participation rules may reduce the habitat area at the margin (by decreasing the stability of coalitions). Price premium for the coalition members increase the habitat area but its budget-effectiveness decreases as the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase.

Agglomeration bonus and endogenous group formation

“…2 First, we find that the GC 2 On this prospect, we build upon the game theory studies on AB schemes (Albers et al, 2008;Arora et al, 2021) but move away from their noncooperative setting. Our analysis is closer to Ansink and Bouma (2013), Zavalloni et al (2019), and Bareille et al (2021), which are among the few studies using coalition formation games for the analysis of conservation policies. Their analyses are, however, applied to minimumparticipation rules, a scheme that does not address the spatial dimension of the conservation efforts.…”

“…8 In our game, players decide on both the amount and location of the conservation efforts in the second stage. Although an increasing number of papers are studying local public goods that address similar issues (Alvarado-Quesada & Weikard, 2017;Bareille et al, 2021), the decision on location is a crucial element of our analysis that is seldom addressed in the coalition formation literature. Indeed, as the bulk of this literature studies the signing of International Environmental Agreements relating to global public goods (e.g., climate change), spatially explicit analyses are not common and players in the second stage only choose the amount of efforts.…”

Farmer collectives for more effective agri-environmental schemes? An assessment framework based on the concept of ‘professionalization’

“…But there are more aspects which could influence the effectiveness of an AES: for example, the budget available, farmers' willingness to participate, the size of the area, the type of landscape, occurrence of species etc. (Bareille et al, 2021;de Vries et al, 2019;Westerink et al, 2020) The three categories distinguished in the assessment framework are not mutually exclusive, they are related and influence each other. Choices made in one category can influence choices in other categories.…”

Empowering voluntary approaches for environmental sustainability and resilient communities: a case study from Okinawa, Japan

“…As the coalition formation theory suggests, it is necessary for a CUA to be formed where the benefit of a CUA member is at least as great as the benefit of a member who leaves the CUA as discussed, for example, in the context of fishery management [41] and management of ecosystem services in agriculture [42]; that is, a free-rider payoff (internal stability) [43]. Namely, operators must have an incentive to stay as a member of the CUA.…”