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Summary “Nature's contributions to people” (NCP) is designed to provide space for the recognition of diverse and evolving culturally mediated ideas about what people derive from, and co-produce with, nature. Its origins, along with the IPBES conceptual framework in which it is embedded, is transdisciplinary, action-oriented, and inclusive and also embraces pluralism. NCP provides both generalizing and context-specific perspectives and analytical tools that can be interwoven and enables diverse actors to represent nature-people interactions for different scales, audiences, and decision-makers. NCP therefore can be used to understand and communicate the ways in which ongoing biodiversity decline may affect the complex relationships between people and nature. This Primer presents NCP in accessible language, highlights its unique contribution as a tool for plural valuation of nature in conservation assessments, clarifies common misconceptions, and provides examples of the innovative ways NCP has already been applied around the world.

With increasing attention on green(ing) cities, urban nature is used to increase liveability, to create new sectors such as tourism, and to boost international investment. What counts as desirable green intervention generally follows internationally accepted practices as cities aim for international recognition. Here, we examine the historic production of a green identity and the ways in which urban leaders have navigated local politics to enact greening. We focus on the mid-sized city Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country, Spain), the 2012 European Green Capital. Based on a critical discourse analysis of archival data and in-depth interviews, we explore the production of a green city-identity over a period of forty years and determine four key processes: (i) early good leadership with a social city being core objective of urban planning, (ii) the need for building shared goals in a context of a violent political conflict in the Basque Country, (iii) policy mobilities and thriving for becoming a green pioneer internationally, and (iv) de-politization of green and sustainability discourses. We argue that the initially perceived social green amenity - an outcome of early progressive urban democratic experimentation - that served as a unifying project across polarized political fractions turned into an economic cultural asset for economic growth, shifting from a political to a sustainability fix. © 2022 The Author(s) This work was supported by the Department of Education of the Basque Government ( PIBA19-0096 ), the City of Vitoria-Gasteiz (and the Centro de Estudios Ambientales ), and by María de Maeztu excellence accreditation 2018-2022 (Ref. MDM-2017-0714), funded by MCIN/AEI / 10.13039/501100011033 /. The authors thank the Centro de Estudios Ambientales Vitoria-Gasteiz for the time and effort of sharing documents and their knowledge about the study context. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments to improve the paper.

Land is increasingly managed to serve multiple societal demands. Beyond food, fiber, habitation, and recreation, land is now being called on to meet demands for carbon sequestration, water purification, biodiversity conservation, and many others. Meeting these multiple demands requires negotiating trade-offs among the choices and differing values placed on them by diverse stakeholders and institutions. Here, we review recent advances in understanding the role of diverse values and trade-offs in managing landscapes to support multiple demands, from a land systems perspective. Recent work by the IPBES and others has recognized the need to accommodate a greater diversity of values into decision-making through the framework of ‘nature’s contributions to people (NCP)’ providing a perspective on human–nature relations that goes beyond a stock-flow, ecosystem services, decision-making framing. NCP offers real potential to enable land system science to better integrate the many diverse value systems of stakeholders and institutions into efforts to better understand and more fairly govern the increasingly wicked tradeoffs of land systems in the Anthropocene, especially under conditions of less well functioning institutions and governance.

Nature is perceived and valued in many different ways. Often, the types of values that are the most important to people depend on how they cognitively frame desirable human-nature relations. For instance, the value of nature can be seen through a utilitarian lens, e.g., as providing ecosystem services for humans. Alternatively, it can also be considered valuable for non-instrumental reasons, e.g., for its sacred or spiritual significance. In this paper we use a framed field experiment to test how people belonging to three distinct communities in Colombia (Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and Campesino) respond to different ways of framing payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes, so as to assess potential motivational crowding effects of pro-social/intrinsic motivations for forest conservation. The experimental results indicate that crowding-in of intrinsic motivations for forest conservation occurred in participants from the Indigenous community when the PES scheme was framed in a way that highlighted relational values of the forest. By contrast, motivational crowding-in took place for participants in the framed field experiment from the Campesino community when the PES scheme was introduced in a way that highlighted instrumental values instead. Participants from the Afro-Colombian community did not show evidence of motivational crowding under either framing. Together, these results suggest that PES schemes that are framed in a way that harmonizes with locally salient human-nature relational models and associated values are more likely to cause motivational crowding-in, and thus encourage higher rates of environmental conservation, even after payments are discontinued.

This paper expands the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) values framing about nature and its contributions to people by exploring the notion of ‘disvalues’, which pertains to aspects of nature that reduce well being (instrumental disvalues), relationships that are detrimental to a dignified and flourishing life (relational disvalues), or the perception of badness in an absolute sense, regardless of the impact on people (intrinsic disvalues). Shedding light on how people express disvalues helps to better capture their preferences and subjective perspectives, as well as account for the socioenvironmental positions from which they speak. Considering the full spectrum of disvalues opens up new ways to better identify social–ecological trade-offs, a necessary step for seeking solutions and finding common ground on sustainability and justice.

Relational values as preferences, principles and virtues about human-nature relationships have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. The term has been used to include concepts and knowledge from a wide range of social sciences and humanities, e.g., importantly making space for qualitative approaches often neglected within environmental management and science. Meanwhile, crucial questions have emerged. What counts as a relational value, and what does not? How do relational values (RVs) compare with other value categories and terms, including held, assigned, instrumental, moral, shared, social, and non-material values (e.g., associated with cultural ecosystem services)? In this article, we address these issues, partly by providing context about how the RV term originated and how it has evolved to date. Most importantly, because of their somewhat unique combination of groundedness and moral relevance, positive relational values may offer important opportunities for the evolution of values that may be necessary for transformative change towards sustainability. The special issue includes contributions that contemplate particular concepts (e.g., care, stewardship, eudaimonia human flourishing), applications (e.g., environmental assessment, environmental policy design), and the history of relevant scholarship in various intellectual traditions (e.g., ecological economics, human ecology, environmental education). Together with this suite of thought-provoking papers, we hope that the clarification we provide here facilitates a broad and productive interdisciplinary exchange to create and refine a reflective but powerful tool for sustainability and justice. © 2018 We have been funded by a Canadian SSHRC Insight Grant (#435-2017-1071) and a UBC Killam Research Fellowship (KC).

Increased drought frequency in many parts of the world, especially in the global South, is expected due to accelerating climate change. We present a bioeconomic model that unpacks the role of soil biodiversity as contributing to both increasing and stabilizing agricultural productivity in low-input rainfed farming systems. The natural insurance value of soil biodiversity mostly depends on farmers' risk preferences as well as on the frequency of drought events to be insured against. We show that when the probability of drought increases, soil biodiversity conservation can be an optimal ecosystem-based adaptation strategy. However, this is only likely to be the case up to a given drought probability threshold. The natural insurance value of soil biodiversity for climate change adaptation in drought prone rainfed agricultural systems depends on a combination of key hydrological, agronomic and economic parameters. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.

Understanding farmers' reasons for growing diverse crop portfolios is essential for supporting the conservation of agricultural biodiversity to foster social-ecological resilience and conserve crop genetic resources. In this paper, Q methodology is applied to examine the motivations for growing diverse crops among semi-subsistence rural farmers in Papua New Guinea. Various types of farmers are identified including so-called ‘marketer-consumers,’ who are highly motivated by crop sale, and ‘exhibitionists,’ who prioritize the ‘show’ values of crops. This approach can be applied to better target programs seeking to conserve crop diversity and promote new crop varieties in regions undergoing rapid transformation.

Acknowledging the diversity of preferences, goals and motivations of individuals is key to promote the effectiveness of incentive-based conservation interventions. This paper analyses the heterogeneity of motivations to adopt silvopastoral practices, a social-ecological innovation for soil conservation and carbon emission reduction. We use Q methodology to identify smallholders' views with regard to these practices in a community in the forest frontier in Chiapas (Mexico). The analysis uncovers three main perspectives: self-sufficient pioneers, environmentally-conscious followers and payment-dependent conservatives. We discuss these perspectives around three topics: smallholders' predisposition to adopt silvopastoral practices, their views about needing external payments to sustain their livelihood and the diffusion of innovative sustainable practices. We relate these perspectives with livelihood characteristics and with observed adoption levels under a pilot programme to promote silvopasture. Our findings suggest that incentives other than payments may be more appropriate for those more likely to adopt, and that payments could encourage rent-seeking strategies and not necessarily promote permanent behavioural change. We suggest ways for designing more effective and adaptive environmental conservation programmes to foster adoption and continuation of social-ecological innovations.

This paper sheds light on the potential of group-level tenders to enhance conservation where it depends on cooperation of small-scale farmers. We analyze data from two pilot payment for ecosystem service (PES) schemes focused on the conservation of agricultural biodiversity in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. Contracts were assigned to farming groups who could choose between different types of in-kind payments with varying degrees of divisibility between group members. Our main results indicate that: (1) stronger general patterns of collective action are positively related to the level of cooperation in group-bid making; (2) where collective action is robust, collective payments seem to provide stronger conservation incentives than individual payments; (3) collective payments could mitigate some potential rent-seeking behavior; (4) selecting bid offers based on both a ‘cooperation’ criterion and conservation land area offered does not overly compromise the cost-effectiveness of PES; and (5) group-level contracts may create strong incentives for contract compliance. Hence, combining farmer group-level contracts with collective in-kind payments can enhance the cost-effectiveness of conservation tenders, while generating co-benefits in terms of increased interaction and social capital among group members.

Crop choice, including the conservation of traditional crops and the uptake of novel ones, is a central issue in agricultural development. This paper examines differences between male and female farmers’ motivations for growing diverse crop portfolios in Papua New Guinea, a highly agro-biodiverse context facing rapid social change. Q methodology, a mixed qualitative-quantitative approach, is used to examine how alignment with different viewpoints related to crop diversity differs across male and female farmers. We show that, of five distinct ‘types’ of farmers identified with regards to crop diversity choices, all include both men and women, and three of five groups show no significant gender-related differences. However, there are also some significant gender differences. A large proportion of women farmers associate with being highly motivated by crop marketing, whereas male farmers are more likely to favor agricultural diversity due to tradition or status motivations. Overall, strict gendering of crops does not appear highly salient. The results confirm earlier work in the region on women’s roles in marketing but contrast to those on crop gendering. Altogether, they underline the complexity of gender and identity in agricultural choices. The results also have implications for the targeting and implementation of crop conservation and promotion policies and programs, including those aiming for improved nutrition or agricultural development.

Although power relations largely mediate access, use and management of ecosystems, they have not yet been considered in ecosystem services science. This omission limits the ability of the ecosystem services approach to guide environmental decision-making that can deliver ecological sustainability and socially fair outcomes. We propose three ways to address power relations more centrally: (1) analyze how power relations underpin the governance and institutions that determine access to and control over ecosystem services; (2) assess how labor relations around ecosystem services co-production impact human well-being; and (3) recognize the historical co-evolution of power relations and environmental change in shaping ecosystem services values. We believe that IPBES offers a unique opportunity to orchestrate transdisciplinary efforts to integrate power relations in ecosystem assessments.

Transformative change for urban sustainability and resilience calls for the use of new governance approaches that take into account the complexity of urban systems and associated stakeholder knowledge and perceptions. This raises the need to explore the cognitive dimension in the management of urban resilience and transformation. The article presents a Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping approach to develop plausible policy scenarios that support the decarbonisation of the urban energy system of the city of Bilbao, Basque Country. Scenario results indicate that a combination of local institutional and social action may be most conducive for stimulating effective and sustainable transformation of Bilbao's urban energy system. We address the properties of the resulting cognitive network, with a focus on the role of the energy system's connectivity which is found to present conflicting potential for resilience and transformation.

In assessment of costs (and benefits) of wildlife conservation, conventional economic valuation frameworks may inadequately address various non-tangible values and neglect social, cultural and political contexts of resources and their use. Correspondingly, there seems to be much more focus on quantifying the economic, material benefits and costs of wildlife conservation than the non-material aspects that also affect human well-being. In addition, current research on the costs of wildlife conservation tends to be discipline-focused which constrains comparability, often causing conceptual ambiguity. This paper is an attempt to address this ambiguity. While there is growing acknowledgement of the material costs of wildlife conservation, we contend that employing a broader, composite social well-being approach may provide better conceptual insights on—and practical options for—managing various non-material impacts of wildlife conservation for local people. Non-material impacts such as negative physical or psychological experiences, trauma, feelings of fear and anxiety cannot directly be measured by or converted to money but such impacts still lead to human ill-being. Thus, taking these impacts into account is critical for the broader sustainability of wildlife conservation, making understanding and addressing them a key socio-ecological issue.

Valuation can be used for a wide range of purposes, including informing environmental decision-making, designing and evaluating policies, and acknowledging and raising awareness of the importance of the environment. A promising development in the field of environmental valuation that is receiving increasing attention is the hybridization of stated preference methods and deliberative approaches. Proponents claim that deliberative monetary valuation (DMV) can successfully address many of the limitations ascribed to more conventional monetary valuation approaches. However, DMV has scarcely been tested in contexts of the Global South thus far, where arguably, the benefits it offers may be most relevant. In this paper we study the applicability DMV on preference elicitation in a rural Indigenous community in Colombia. We find that DMV is superior to conventional stated preference approaches in terms of its capacity to elicit more considered, informed, and diverse values. Our results suggest that DMV offers learning opportunities for participants, the benefits of which are greater for those for whom conventional valuation exercises may seem too cognitively complex. We find that by the end of the deliberative workshop, participants were considering a wider range of preferences. We control for one of the main risks of DMV, which is the possibility of participants with a higher social status exercising a dominant role during the deliberative process, and do not find evidence of this being the case. Our results suggest that one of the main advantages of DMV is its capacity to capture a much broader set of values than conventional valuation approaches, including instrumental, relational and intrinsic values.

Far right political movements are rising and seizing power in many influential countries, affecting not only the governance of democratic regimes but also the science-policy relationship and the global environmental agenda. Here we disentangle the roots of such far right insurgency and discuss the implications for ecological economics as a field. We propose that in order to be able to understand and address this phenomenon, ecological economists should devote attention to analyse how the evolution of value systems (including environmental values) is related to the profile and governance of contemporary global capitalism. By means of developing a relevant research agenda, ecological economics could contribute to support academically the creation of a politics of hope , in response to the politics of fear on which emerging authoritarian regimes rely. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. U.P. is supported under the Basque Centre for Climate Change “Unit of Excellence” (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; MDM-2017-0714).

This paper addresses the differential impacts on decisions towards collective action in the context of payments for ecosystem services (PES) where individual and collective rewards are conditional on a minimum collective conservation level being achieved. Interactions between the different reward types, farmers' social preferences, social ties and communication are identified. A field game experiment is conducted with Andean farmers in Peru and framed around their decisions to conserve agrobiodiversity as an impure public good. The main results are that PES schemes could be effective in motivating collective action for agrobiodiversity conservation and that individual rewards are likely to be more effective and less sensitive to social factors than collective rewards. The latter might have a positive effect on conservation when they are shared within socially closely-related groups or in situations where communication and deliberation about collective action are possible.

This paper addresses the importance of the cognitive dimension in urban sustainability transition policy practice. Many and diverse actors with contrasting interests interact in urban sustainability transitions. Their perceptions and values impact the potential uptake of transition strategies in urban systems. It is thus important to understand how actors view themselves involved in such processes. A case study on low carbon transitions for the city of Bilbao (Basque Country) is presented to explore the barriers and opportunities for an energy transition using Q methodology. Results suggest that stakeholders' motivation and perceived capacity for change are mainly related to four main discourses: follower, visionary, pragmatist and sceptic. Results also indicate that information exchange, communication and participation in decision-making processes, bridging visionaries and pragmatists with decision-makers, are key for bringing about effective transition processes. This study contributes to identifying attitudes of actors who can negotiate urban low-carbon transitions and stresses the need to build a common shared cognitive vision of whether and how sustainable urban transformation can take place.

Agricultural intensification has contributed substantially to the increase in food production, but has come at the expense of soil degradation and environmental problems. Management of soil based ecosystem services need to be considered in agricultural management since intensive management implies not only costs to the farmer but also to society. In this study we used data from four long-term (55 years) agricultural experiments in southern Sweden to assess the effects of two arable farming systems on a range of indicators of soil ecosystem services. One farming system used only annual commodity crops (ACC system) while the other integrated one year of ley (ley system) into the crop rotation. Nitrogen (N) fertiliser was applied annually in both farming systems at two rates (0 and 150 kg N ha(-1)). The ley farming system had an addition of farmyard manure (FYM) once every fourth year. Soil organic carbon, total N, phosphorous, potassium, pH and water holding capacity were used as indicators of regulating services; bacterial and fungal biomass were used as indicators of supporting services; grain yield and protein content were used as indicators of provisioning services. We analysed each of the indicators separately, to identify effects of the farming systems, using linear mixed effects models. In addition, we used principal components analysis to bundle the individual indicators together to create latent variables representing categories of ecosystem services. Yields of wheat were greatest in the plots that received N fertiliser, irrespective of farming system, while mycorrhizal fungal biomass was greatest in the ley system with no inorganic N fertiliser. The rest of the indicators were similar in both farming systems although the lowest values of all ecosystem service indicators were found in the ACC system with no N fertiliser. When bundling the indicators, no trade-offs were found between regulating, supporting and provisioning services. Regulating and supporting services were positively correlated, as were regulating and provisioning services. The ley system with N fertiliser had significantly greater values of regulating and provisioning services relative to the other treatments. The results indicate that different farming systems can have large effects on ecosystem service flows, and that integrating leys into arable rotations can enhance the delivery of soil ecosystem services. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (Less)

Highlights • Empirical evidence: privatisation of conservation choices of biodiversity patrimony. • Strong privatisation of microbe category with marked collective good properties. • Worldwide survey of 103 ex situ collections. • Possibly skewing the future ex situ patrimony away from low probability-high impact events., Public service (ex situ) micro-organism collections serve to secure genetic resources for unforeseen future needs, and importantly, to provide authenticated biomaterials for contemporaneous use in private and public entities and as upstream research materials. Hence, it is important to understand the functioning and strategic decisions of these providers of public good resources.2 The existing literature tends to use case studies of individual collections. This paper uses a unique worldwide survey of microbial collections to analyse the heterogeneity among culture collections, and to empirically assess the economic and institutional conditions that contribute to this heterogeneity with respect to conservation choice and associated industry spillovers. Results suggest that in the short run public-private partnerships may indeed support knowledge accumulation with particularly strong public good properties. It is important to be aware of this strong tie, in order to steer also the long term conservation patrimony into one that offers not only short term usability but also resilience to future unforeseen needs e.g. of emerging crop plagues.

This paper provides insights into the multiple dimensions of fairness in payments for ecosystem services (PES) using the results of pilot agrobiodiversity conservation auctions. In two sites in the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes farming groups bid for payments for the conservation of traditional crop varieties. We assess different payment rules relating to how to allocate payments among groups subject to a fixed conservation budget. The discriminatory, uniform and conditional payment rules tested in these case studies incorporate alternative principles of fairness, while resulting in varying conservation and distributional outcomes. The latter are measured in terms of the distributional equality of payments among farmers and groups, and the distributional effects of payments on different types of groups. Findings indicate that conservation and distributional outcomes are highly sensitive to the payment rule chosen and vary across study sites. There may be contexts where cost-effectiveness does not need to be traded-off against fairness. Yet given the number of competing fairness considerations, achieving PES outcomes that are perceived as fair is very challenging.

article i nfo This paper examines the role of direct compensation payments for agrobiodiversity conservation, using minor millet landraces in India as an example. The cost of farmer participation in a hypothetical 'payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services' (PACS) scheme is estimated using a stated preference valuation approach. Significant inter-crop and inter-varietal differences are observed with respect to consumption values, upon which the compensation demanded by farm households is shown to primarily depend. Drawing on a categorisation of consumption values and farmer preferences, the paper points to the importance of si- multaneously considering a range of potential interventions in order to conserve a priority portfolio of agrobiodiverse resources in predominantly subsistence-based agricultural systems.

Summary This paper addresses the relevance of agricultural seed systems in terms of the production and dissemination of seed in the context of adaptation to climate change. Using nationwide household level data from Malawi, we examine the hypothesis that climatic shocks increase small-scale farmers’ reliance on purchased seeds, in particular from local seed markets, an element of the informal seed sector. The results are used to discuss the role of seed systems for potentially supporting small-scale farmers’ adaptation mechanisms in the face of climate change in Malawi. This study has implications for other similar sub-Saharan African contexts.

Summary This paper explores the potential effects of external reward systems on conservation behavior by accounting for their interactions with patterns of collective action. In order to simulate such dynamics, we conducted framed field experiments in farming communities from the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. These game-based simulation exercises were framed around agrobiodiversity conservation decisions the participating farmers were very familiar with. We find that collective rewards could be ineffective and crowd-out social norms. Promisingly though, individual rewards appear to increase conservation levels through a crowding-in effect that stabilizes collective action.

In this paper we present a multi-disciplinary analysis of the potential impacts of undertaking similar environmental actions on multiple farms in a small geographic area, using organic farming as a proxy for a co-ordinated approach. Recent papers have called for more co-ordinated efforts between farmers in terms of their environmental actions, but there has been limited applied research demonstrating the environmental benefits or the economic and social implications to farmers of this approach. Comparative analysis of biodiversity, soil and water, and farm profitability were undertaken in England on 32 matched farms in areas of low and high organic farming concentration; qualitative interviews were also conducted with 48 farmers living in two of the eight areas. Findings demonstrate higher overall levels of biodiversity on organic farms (particularly in “hotspot” areas) but this was not universal across the species groups investigated. Higher water infiltration rates were found in organic grasslands, which could prove to be a useful measure to combat flooding. In terms of the technical efficiency of producing these environmental gains, conventional and organic farms in hotspot areas demonstrated equivalent efficiency from a financial perspective. Socio-cultural research identified the different amounts of trust farmers have in their neighbours, based in part on their performance as ‘good farmers’. We discuss the neighbourhood effect with a multi-disciplinary approach and conclude that encouraging local farmer co-ordination can have clear environmental benefits without high economic cost, but must be undertaken with caution – specifically regarding the trade-offs between benefits, local geophysical and social characteristics, and assumptions made about inter-farmer trust.

This meta-analysis of land-cover transformations of the past 10–15 years in tropical forest-agriculture frontiers world-wide shows that swidden agriculture decreases in landscapes with access to local, national and international markets that encourage cattle production and cash cropping, including biofuels. Conservation policies and practices also accelerate changes in swidden by restricting forest clearing and encouraging commercial agriculture. However, swidden remains important in many frontier areas where farmers have unequal or insecure access to investment and market opportunities, or where multi-functionality of land uses has been preserved as a strategy to adapt to current ecological, economic and political circumstances. In some areas swidden remains important simply because intensification is not a viable choice, for example when population densities and/or food market demands are low. The transformation of swidden landscapes into more intensive land uses has generally increased household incomes, but has also led to negative effects on the social and human capital of local communities to varying degrees. From an environmental perspective, the transition from swidden to other land uses often contributes to permanent deforestation, loss of biodiversity, increased weed pressure, declines in soil fertility, and accelerated soil erosion. Our prognosis is that, despite the global trend towards land use intensification, in many areas swidden will remain part of rural landscapes as the safety component of diversified systems, particularly in response to risks and uncertainties associated with more intensive land use systems.

This paper discusses the potential application of Payment for Ecosystem Services-like schemes to tackle market failures associated with the public good characteristics of agrobiodiversity conservation services. So called payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services (PACS) would increase the private benefits from utilizing local plant and animal genetic resources on-farm through voluntary reward mechanisms, so as to sustain their on-farm conservation. Theoretical and applied insights about PACS are discussed and attention drawn to some of the challenges to be overcome in implementing PACS. In particular, these relate to the identification of potential buyers, the complex institutional setting in which PACS might operate and the articulation of a meaningful conservation goal based on a safe minimum standard approach. The latter is urgently needed, so as to ensure that additional agrobiodiversity services are generated. Relative to a fixed pricing approach, PACS schemes that seek to overcome information asymmetries through the use of conservation auctions may be associated with significant efficiency gains. However, potential trade-offs between ecological effectiveness, economic efficiency, and social equity considerations need to be carefully evaluated.

This paper provides a critique of the cost-benefit analysis tool for ecosystem services policy evaluation. We argue that when applied to public ecosystem services, the theoretical assumptions that underlie economic valuation and cost-benefit analysis fail to fully acknowledge the multiple dimensions of human well-being, the plural forms of value articulation, the complex nature of ecosystems, the distributional biases of markets and the fairness implications of spatio-temporal framing. The current monistic utilitarian approach to ecosystem services policy evaluation should therefore be replaced by a pluralist framework composed of a heterogeneous set of value-articulating instruments that are appropriate to the specific context within which decision-making takes place. It is argued that within this pluralist framework cost-benefit analysis may remain an appropriate tool to examine the contingent trade-offs of local policies that have limited impacts on ecosystems and their services.

This paper addresses the relationship between agrobiodiversity conservation and sustainable agricultural intensification. A stylised theoretical model is used to explore the conditions by which both agrobiodiversity and conventional input intensification may increase through optimal adjustments of input use in agrobiodiversity-poor agroecosystems. The model shows that this result can arise in quite general circumstances where there is (1) an agricultural production technology that allows a positive relationship between ecological integrity of a given agricultural area and agricultural productivity, and (2) decision maker preferences that recognise this positive relationship and generate resource allocation decisions that support it. While increase in agrobiodiversity conservation is a necessary condition for optimal resource adjustments, whether input use will increase or decrease along this optimal path depends on the buffering effect of agrobiodiversity on ecosystem damage and the relative societal welfare impacts of agricultural output (e.g., food and fibre) reductions and ecosystem damage. Thus we identify conditions that promote agrobiodiversity as a supporting service for the sustainable intensification of agricultural production. A provocative hypothesis derived from the model points at the possibility that ecosystem damage (agrobiodiversity loss) can optimally decline even when agriculture undergoes an intensification process.

"Sustainable de-growth” is both a concept and a social-grassroots (Northern) movement with its origins in the fields of ecological economics, social ecology, economic anthropology and environmental and social activist groups. This paper introduces the concept of sustainable de-growth by mapping some of the main intellectual influences from these fields, with special focus on the Francophone and Anglophone thinking about this emergent notion. We propose hypotheses pertaining to the appeal of sustainable de-growth, and compare it to the messages enclosed within the dominant sustainable development idea. We scrutinize the theses, contradictions, and consequences of sustainable de-growth thinking as it is currently being shaped by a heterogeneous body of literature and as it interacts with an ample and growing corpus of social movements. We also discuss possible future paths for the de- growth movement compared to the apparent weakening of the sustainable development paradigm., SCOPUS: sh.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Social capital is often claimed to facilitate collective action regarding the management of complex environmental goods and services. However, there is little systematic analysis in the literature that explains the way social capital aids in fostering collective action. The paper integrates ideas from institutional ecological economics, sociology and anthropology to argue that power relations, involving struggle and resistance, should be acknowledged as they affect collective action. We address the question of why social capital should not be straightforwardly associated positively with common property resource management. To unravel the complexity of the links between social capital, collective action and common property resource management, the concepts of common knowledge and symbolic power are introduced.

The main focus of this paper is agrobiodiversity and its effects on agricultural production within agricultural landscapes. The interest is to shed light about the fundamental causes of agrobiodiversity loss by focusing upon the institutional or meso-economic environment that mediates farmers’ decentralized decisions. Since the main causes of farmers’ decisions to ‘disinvest’ in agrobiodiversity as an asset lie in the incentives offered by current markets and other institutions, the solution to the problem also lies in corrective institutional design. This paper discusses the institutional issues involved in establishing market-like mechanisms for agrobiodiversity conservation. Three steps are highlighted in such process: demonstration (valuation), capture and sharing of conservation benefits (mechanism design). This information is then used to examine the potential success of nascent market creation incentive mechanisms for biodiversity conservation, including: (i) payments/rewards for ecosystem services, (ii) direct compensation payments, (iii) land use development rights, and (iv) auctions for biodiversity conservation. The potential gains to society from their use with regard to agrobiodiversity conservation are discussed and some illustrative examples involving their application in different parts of the world are also described. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A biodiversity-based paradigm for sustainable agriculture is a potential solution for many of the problems associated with intensive, high inputagriculture,andforgreaterresilience totheenvironmentaland socioeconomicrisksthatmayoccurintheuncertainfuture.Thechallenge is to understand the combined ecological and social functions of agrobiodiversity, determine its contribution to ecosystem goods and services and value for society at large, and evaluate options for the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity across the agricultural landscape. Agrobiodiversity is most likely to enhance agroecosystem functioning when assemblages of species are added whose presence results in unique or complementary effects on ecosystem functioning, e.g., by planting genotypes with genes for higher yield or pest resistance, mixing specific genotypes of crops, or including functional groups that increase nutrient inputs and cycling. Simply adding more species to most agroecosystems may have little effect on function, given the redundancy in many groups, especially for soil organisms. The adoption of biodiversity-based practices for agriculture, however, is only partially based on the provision of ecosystem goods and services, since individual farmers typically react to the private use value of biodiversity, not the ‘external’ benefits of conservation that accrue to the wider society. Evaluating the actual value associated with goods and services provided by agrobiodiversity requires better communication between ecologists and economists, and the realization of the consequences of either overrating its value based on ‘received wisdom’ about potential services, or underrating it by only acknowledging its future option or quasi-optionvalue. Partnerships between researchers, farmers, and other stakeholders to integrate ecological and socioeconomic research help evaluate ecosystem services, the tradeoffs of different management scenarios, and the potential for recognition or rewards for provision of ecosystem services. This paper considers ways that scientists from different disciplines can collaborate to determine the functions and value of agrobiodiversity for agricultural production, but within the context of understanding how biodiversity can be conserved in landscape mosaics that contain mixtures of land use types. # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Opuntia scrublands are important ecological–economic systems in the Andean area. They perform a major role protecting slopes against erosion, improving the soil properties and providing a variety of products employed in the human diet, and in animal feeding, as well as cochineal insects, a highly valued source of dyes. The collection of the insects has represented an important economic activity for the local communities since pre-Columbian times. Current Peruvian production represents between 85% and 90% of the global market, and is mainly based on collection of the insect in natural Opuntia scrublands located in the poorest Andean areas of Ayacucho. Although much is known about the financial benefits of cochineal for exporters and dye manufacturers, information about the value of standing Opuntia scrubs to collectors and the relative contribution of Opuntia scrubs to their household economies is scarce. Here we contribute to the estimation of the use value of Opuntia scrublands to local communities in Ayacucho by initially exploring the cultural domain of Opuntia in order to identify the ecosystem goods and services recognized by peasants, and later presenting empirical estimates of their importance to annual household income.

This paper argues that the vision of a fundamental clash between a Homo economicus self-interested perspective, dominant in neoclassical economics, and an environmental limit discourse and duty based perspective, central to ecological economics, is an ineffective route towards facilitating effective environmental policy. An evolution to refocus both perspectives towards finding a common ground faces intense resistance from entrenched positions. A conceptual exploration of the roots of such resistances is discussed and an alternative, but complimentary process that addresses the need for and process of a synthesis of conflicting approaches is proposed. As an exemplar of this argument, the Porter hypothesis is used as a guiding framework of how ecological economics as an action oriented paradigm can increase its influence as a policy guide avoiding confrontational policy contexts.

Much attention is being paid to find alternative land use options in slash-and-burn (SaB) farming (or forest–fallow-based shifting cultivation) systems. The conservation objective is often twofold; that is, to discourage farmers from expanding into the forest frontier and to reduce the ecological damage from burning plots. Options include the total abandonment of forest plots, the adoption of productivity increasing green revolution-type technologies, and the application of modern ‘evergreen’ agroforestry knowledge. This paper evaluates another alternative: the intensification of land use by improving technical efficiency in farming. This involves the reduction of land clearing while at the same time maintaining crop output levels and the local (and traditional) low-input technology. The potential for such land use intensification is empirically assessed with ecological and socioeconomic household data from Yucatan (Mexico). The methodology is based on both parametric and nonparametric output and input distance functions. In addition, the sources of inefficiency are addressed. The results of the analysis suggest that on-and off-farm labour diversification can play a key role to help shifting cultivating households to improve their technical efficiency in farming and thus to help to intensify land use. Furthermore, while the empirical results point towards the positive effect of soil fertility, mainly determined by the length of forest fallows, on crop output levels, farmers appear to overcome the ecological constraint of farming in less fertile soils by being more technically efficient.

Opuntia scrublands are important ecological–economic systems in rural Andean areas. They provide goods for peasants' diet and animal feed, as well as cochineal insects, a highly valued source of dyes. Land clearance on these scrublands promotes changes in land use, from nonproductive wilderness to cochineal and fruit harvest areas, grazing lands, and fuel–wood supply zones. Here we empirically explore the role of social capital on land clearance, based on a case study of the Humanga region of Ayacucho, Peru. The literature on social capital is showing evidence of the positive effect of social capital on development actions and on environmental conservation in rural areas of developing countries such as participatory forest management. Here, the notion of social capital is captured by the idea that some features of social organization, such as networks, facilitate coordination and cooperation within the peasant communities that help in managing different economic activities, both on- and off-farm. The habilitation of the scrublands in the Andean mountain environment could be generating negative externalities as a consequence of altering the vegetation cover such as soil erosion. Because the benefits arising from land clearance activities are obtained by cochineal collecting households and the negative environmental effects are costs imposed upon noncochineal collectors, the social capital associated with scrubland habilitation could be perverse from an agro–environmental viewpoint and a revision of some government policies and of some NGOs actions for rural development through the promotion of various community networks in this deprived area could be needed.

This paper analyses the relationship between rural poverty and soil degradation in the context of a shifting cultivating community. A deterministic optimal control model demonstrates how a representative household's labour allocation affects the natural resource base on which its livelihood largely depends. The comparative static examination of relevant parameters and welfare effects of changes in the real wage rate are discussed. The theoretical results obtained are calibrated with data from the Yucatan, Mexico.