Payments for Ecosystem Services as a Policy Mix: Demonstrating the institutional analysis and development framework on conservation policy instruments

Abstract

Policy mix analysis has been applied in research on energy, climate, urban and transport policy, and more recently biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. However, policy mix analysis has thus far been employed at a high conceptual level, focusing on describing interactions between instrument types. Policy mix analysis rarely describes instrument ‘structure’ or functional characteristics in a way that would answer the question ‘what constitutes an instrument’? We describe how the rules‐in‐use taxonomy of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, developed for research on common pool resource management, can be used to characterize conservation policy instrument interactions. We demonstrate the approach on the well‐known payments for ecosystem services (PES) program in Costa Rica and cross‐compliance policies, arguing that PES is a policy mix rather than a single economic instrument. Our analysis shows how design features of PES described in the economics literature map to ‘rules‐in‐use’ in the IAD framework. The framework provides a terminology for defining what constitutes institutional context, comparing economic, regulatory and information instruments, and studying their interactions. The rules‐in‐use taxonomy of IAD is a ‘structural’ diagnostic approach, which needs to be combined with other tools that analyse the role and ‘agency’ of actors, as part of integrative environmental governance research. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Policy Mixes: Aligning instruments for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provision

“…(), while on‐the‐ground ‘settings’ and ‘calibrations’ are at a similar level of abstraction to policy instrument rules in use in the work of Barton et al . ().…”

“…Barton et al . () provide a taxonomy that distinguishes institutional context from policy instrument characteristics. Their paper highlights the conceptual challenges when ‘instrument characteristics’ in one assessment later become ‘policy context’ and then over the longer term ‘institutional context’, as assessment focus over time shifts to new instruments.…”

“…Three of the six papers in this special issue are based on case studies developed in the POLICYMIX project (Barton et al, 2017;Davenport et al, 2017;Droste et al, 2017). The three papers from outside the project demonstrate complementary perspectives on policy mix analysis (Karsenty et al, 2017;Rayner et al, 2017;Wong et al, 2017).…”

“…Wong et al refer to 'institutional and policy context factors' as formal and informal rules that govern society, but do not specify what kinds of rules are considered context and what rules pertain to the policy instrument under assessment. Barton et al (2017) provide a taxonomy that distinguishes institutional context from policy instrument characteristics. Their paper highlights the conceptual challenges when 'instrument characteristics' in one assessment later become 'policy context' and then over the longer term 'institutional context', as assessment focus over time shifts to new instruments.…”

“…There is also the more conceptual question of whether the ICDP is a single instrument or a policy mix, or, to echo Karsenty et al (2017), whether it is a hybridized instrument or a mix. Barton et al (2017) describe how the rules-in-use taxonomy of Ostrom's (2005) Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework can be used to characterize individual conservation policy instruments. Barton and colleagues characterize Costa Rica's national PES program and supporting legislation such as the National Forest Law and Cadastre in terms of the rules-in-use taxonomy of boundary rules, payoff rules, position rules, choice rules and scope rules.…”