Putting nature ‘to work’ through Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES): Tensions between autonomy, voluntary action and the political economy of agri-environmental practice

Kolinjivadi, Vijay; Mendez, Alejandra Zaga; Dupras, Jérôme

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.11.012

Cited by 24 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…to the noted independent-mindedness that characterizes many farmers. In such cases, a form of an "alter-PES", operated by environmentally-conscious farmers, might develop in the shadow of the formal ALUS program (Kolinjivadi et al, 2019).…”

Section: Environmental Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It can also degrade conditions in places where incentive funding is not yet available, as farmers see the potential for future payments to do something they might have otherwise done anyway. Also, another potentially deleterious repercussion is that some farmers might be tempted to intensify production in order to compensate for land taken out of production through being given over to ALUS (Kolinjivadi et al, 2019). On the other hand, with respect to producing positive financial benefits, given the increasing difficulty of farming some marginal land in the face of climate-related extreme weather, ALUS may make common sense in simply providing a better land-use strategy to apply in toto for net collective gain; i.e.…”

Section: Social Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, despite using a grassroots approach to develop the program, there are still members of the province's farming community that feel more consultation with them is needed, in addition to greater outreach in order to encourage other, presently reticent and possibly recalcitrant individuals who are not currently implementing ALUS on their farms (Lantz et al, 2012). Feelings of a lack of real autonomy are obvious shortcomings of such a top-down administrative structure, established with only minimal input from farmers (Kolinjivadi et al, 2019). Elsewhere across Canada, however, the bottom-up approach that has been adopted by all other past and present ALUS programs, most notably through the PAC framework, has been extremely successful in engaging farmers (Mackenzie, 2008;Rosenberg, 2010;MacLean, 2014;Holland, 2015), and as we found in our cross-system examination, has garnered their widespread endorsement.…”

Section: Social Capital Concerns and Strengthsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The preliminary research undertaken on ALUS is largely available only in internal and grey literature documents that have not been widely circulated. More recent scholarship about ALUS is restricted to particulars about individual programs underway in Norfolk County (Mackenzie, 2008;Rosenberg, 2010;MacLean, 2014;Irvine, 2013) and elsewhere in Ontario (Ouelett, 2018), the Rural Municipality of Blanshard, Manitoba (RMB) (Mann et al, 2014;Holland, 2015), and the province of Prince Edward Island (PEI) (Johnston, 2012;Lantz et al, 2012;Kolinjivadi et al, 2019). Only two of these ten site-specific studies have been published in the peer-reviewed literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Enhancing the Social and Natural Capital of Canadian Agro-Ecosystems through Incentive-Based “Alternative Land Use Services” (ALUS) Programs: Recurring Themes and Emerging Lessons

France¹,

Campbell²,

Sherren³

2019

GEP

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Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) is an incentive-based program established in Canada to pay farmers for their voluntary delivery of ecosystem services (ES). All seven ALUS programs across the country were examined using a standardized case-study approach based on site visits, reading internal documents, attending program meetings, and engaging in semi-structured interviews with program administrators, participating farmers, and advisory board members. Direct content analysis was used to highlight recurrent themes and emerging lessons in relation to the salient particulars of program physical location, administration framework, delivery of ES, and development and receipt by communities. Our three major findings are: 1) Overall, ALUS has been judged by participants to be a very successful program, whose strength is that it is completely voluntary, non-permanent, and readily adaptable to each location's environmental conditions, economic funding base, and cultural milieu. 2) One serious shortcoming of all ALUS programs is a general lack of quantifiable data on their ability to increase ES. Instead, environmental benefits are either assumed or based on the idea that the areal extent of enrolled land is the sole measure of its environmental worth. 3) It may be that the social impact of ALUS is its greatest success. In this regard, for farmers, it is the process of engaging in land-use decision making and the recognition of their role as environmental stewards that is a bigger motivation for participating in an ALUS program than the modest financial incentives which they receive.

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Section: Environmental Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Capital Concerns and Strengthsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Enhancing the Social and Natural Capital of Canadian Agro-Ecosystems through Incentive-Based “Alternative Land Use Services” (ALUS) Programs: Recurring Themes and Emerging Lessons

France¹,

Campbell²,

Sherren³

2019

GEP

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…al., 2018). This paper offers new insights from previous institutional analyses of PES in Canada (Lavallée and Dupras 2016; Kolinjivadi et al 2019) in adopting the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, suggested by Ostrom (2005), to examine and compare the institutional prescriptions of two incentive programs. We also link policy analysis with ' on the ground' effects of the incentives, by looking at the type of participation and engagement encouraged by incentives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mixing Public and Private Agri-Environment Schemes: Effects on Farmers Participation in Quebec, Canada

Zaga-Mendez

Kolinjivadi

Bissonnette

et al. 2020

International Journal of the Commons

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Incentive-based mechanisms, such as payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly being employed to encourage adoption of biodiversity conservation practices in agriculture. Farmers' participation in a PES depends-amongst other factors-on their interactions with previous programs and schemes. This research analyses how the institutional characteristics and interactions of incentive-based mechanisms shape the type of farmers' participation and the achievement of desired socio-ecological outcomes. This research focusses on the institutional frameworks of two programs in the Province of Quebec, Canada: the 'Prime-Vert' Program (public agri-environment scheme) and the 'Alternative Land Use Services' (ALUS) initiative (a privately-funded "PES" scheme). The institutional prescriptions of these two programs were examined and compared through the lenses of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. We reveal the impact of the institutional framework on farmers' participation by assessing the degree of farmers' engagement in the implementation and management of schemes. Our results showed a strong dependence of the private PES on the public scheme, rendering both programs ultimately managed under the remit of the provincial government. While the complementarity of both programs diversifies sources of funding for farmers, the presence of rigid rules governing these incentives tend to treat farmers as passive beneficiaries of a network of centralized subsidies which they have little control over. This compromises farmers' autonomy as the rigidity of rules impedes any attempt to achieve active participation in the design and implementation of agri-environmental practices.

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Between hierarchies and markets: How street‐level bureaucratic autonomy leads to policy innovations

Barral

Ghosh

2023

European Policy Analysis

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Although street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) play a key role in the implementation of market‐based instruments (MBIs), their participation is widely understudied. This paper addresses this blind spot by engaging the concept of street‐level bureaucratic policy entrepreneurship. Using the case of conservation banking, a market‐based environmental policy in the United States, we explore why this novel instrument has only been adopted in a handful of jurisdictions. We examine both non‐adoption and adoption of conservation banking to find that SLBs are likely to engage in such entrepreneurial acts when a new policy form is particularly useful in legitimizing regulatory enforcement. Implementing a MBI is, however, not straightforward. Organizational conditions can restrain SLB autonomy to implement MBIs, preferring instead to persist with baseline policies, which further underscores the importance of SLB risk‐taking behavior. SLBs must strategically straddle their unique position between the market and the hierarchy to enroll different actors into the new policy arrangement, all within dynamic political–economic conditions.

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Putting nature ‘to work’ through Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES): Tensions between autonomy, voluntary action and the political economy of agri-environmental practice

Cited by 24 publications

References 40 publications

Enhancing the Social and Natural Capital of Canadian Agro-Ecosystems through Incentive-Based “Alternative Land Use Services” (ALUS) Programs: Recurring Themes and Emerging Lessons

Enhancing the Social and Natural Capital of Canadian Agro-Ecosystems through Incentive-Based “Alternative Land Use Services” (ALUS) Programs: Recurring Themes and Emerging Lessons

Mixing Public and Private Agri-Environment Schemes: Effects on Farmers Participation in Quebec, Canada

Between hierarchies and markets: How street‐level bureaucratic autonomy leads to policy innovations

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