Tag: environmental policy
The Role of Multi-Stakeholder Platforms for Creating an Enabling Climate Change Policy Environment in East Africa
Research-based evidence on the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices is vital to their effective uptake, continued use and wider diffusion. In addition, an enabling policy environment at the national and regional levels is necessary for this evidence to be used effectively. This chapter analyzes a 4-year period of continuous policy engagement in East Africa in an attempt to understand the role of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) in facilitating an enabling policy environment for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The study shows how MSPs enhanced a sense of ownership, developed knowledge, created linkages between different governance levels and a wide variety of actors (including policymakers and scientists), and, most significantly, improved policy formulation.
Environmental services and land use change in Southeast Asia: from recognition to regulation or reward?
Awareness of environmental services and land use change in Southeast Asia is high among scientists, policymakers, and society. In the case of transboundary smoke, the level of awareness and concern in the region is high, but subsides in between periods of’crisis’. Although there is a rising level of awareness of habitat loss and associated loss of genetic diversity, the basic cause-effect relationships underlying the ecological roles of biodiversity are still debated. Degradation of watershed functions is the most mature of our three meso-scale environmental topics; indeed it shows signs of being’fossilized’ by vested interests in the present consensus. Land use planning and other regulatory approaches have had little success. Policy instruments for achieving meso-level environmental policy objectives through changing incentives such as payment schemes for environmental services, have not been tested widely in Southeast Asia (or anywhere else). Further research and experimentation needs to incorporate strategic consideration of processes and spatial scales of environmental impacts and resource governance.
Reforestation, livelihoods and income equality: Lessons learned from China’s Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program
Despite global momentum in restoration activities, their socio-economic implications are little studied. Thus far, the limited evidence available tends to overlook equity and equality outcomes. In this work, we aimed at investigating fairness within the Chinese Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP), given the relevance of local people’s support for the long-term success of land restoration and for the inherent belief that equity should be pursued also by environmental policies. Additionally, we propose a methodology to investigate equity and equality, from a quantitative perspective. Our results suggested a shift in the overall households’ economic structure, with the main changes being a decrease in farming activities (−44 pp) and a sharp increase in out-migration (+44 pp), with the most significant variation within the lowest income groups (−57 pp and + 75 pp, respectively). We also observed that both equality (the Gini coefficient decreased by 23%) and equity (higher income increase for low-income groups) improved, and the best enhancement happened in the regions where the CCFP has been implemented for a longer time. Moreover, data showed that the main driver of inequality was households’ income deriving from remittances, both before and after the Program implementation (with concentration coefficient equal to 1.1 and 1.0, respectively) but its effect decreased over time suggesting an increase in out-migration opportunities for lower-income households. Finally, we found that the level of participation in the Program holds a quite strong explanatory power for both on-farm and off-farm income (explaining 19% and 18% of their respective variability).
To what extent is REDD + integrated into land-use sectors driving deforestation? Insights from Cameroon
Environmental policies ought to be integrated into economic sectors for successful outcomes. We assess to what extent Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD +) is integrated into land-use sectors driving deforestation in Cameroon. REDD + governance has been extensively examined, including the challenges of a multisectoral approach to tackle the drivers of deforestation, especially those lying outside the forestry sector. Yet, these studies have focussed on cross-sectoral coordination, giving little attention to factors such as political will and the adequacy of policy instruments for integration. We amend and apply an innovative framework for environmental policy integration to conduct a comprehensive assessment of REDD + policy integration in Cameroon, a Congo Basin country experiencing increasing deforestation rates due to agriculture, husbandry, infrastructure development and mining. Drawing from policy documents and in-depth interviews with key informants, we found out that territorial battles between ministries, insecurity about their understanding of forest matters in different land-use sectors, and dysfunctional policy instruments have undermined REDD + policy integration. Our study suggests that REDD + integration into land-use sectors would be enhanced by informing stakeholders about their roles in the REDD + process, completing and legitimising the forest zoning plan, addressing loopholes in environmental assessment regulations, and alleviating inconsistencies in land-use rules. These instruments would be reinforced with an economic tool internalising carbon costs in projects generating forest emissions.
Methods for studying Covid-19 impacts on wildlife conservation policies and local livelihoods in Vietnam
Over the past 10 years, the Government of Vietnam has developed many policies towards wildlife conservation. The introduction of the Vietnam Forestry Development Strategy for 2021–2030 and vision to 2050 outlines strategies and priorities in biodiversity conservation and implementation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). However, effective implementation of these strategies requires context-relevant actions that address issues currently facing central and local governments and people.
Strategy games to improve environmental policymaking
While the scientific community documents environmental degradation and develops scenarios to identify the operational margins of system Earth, less attention is given to how decisions are made that steer the system in one direction or the other. We propose to use strategy games for this purpose, increasing the representation of human agency in scenario development and creating spaces for deliberation between different worldviews. Played by the right people, strategy games could help break free from established norms and support more transparent democratic dialogues, responding to the human and social limitations of current decision-making. The question is, who gets to play?
A decade of mangrove conservation achievements and challenges in Vietnam
Key messages
- The last decade has seen significant and marked improvements in the legal framework on mangrove protection, increased funding and involvement of non-state actors in mangrove protection and development, lower rates of mangrove forest loss and larger areas of planted mangroves in Vietnam.
- Despite these remarkable achievements, challenges remain for mangrove conservation, particularly when major drivers of mangrove deforestation and degradation have yet to be properly addressed as they are closely linked to national economic development priorities.
- Weak law enforcement, overreliance on inadequate central budget financing for mangrove protection, and inequitable distribution of benefits and rights relating to mangrove resources further challenge effective, efficient and equitable mangrove management.
- The government still affords more attention to planting new mangroves than providing strong incentives for conserving existing mangrove forests.
- Future mangrove protection and development in Vietnam requires stronger political will from the government to find a balance between economic development and mangrove conservation priorities, as well as participatory decision-making processes where the private sector and local communities are provided with better incentives to engage in mangrove protection.
Experts and resource users split over solutions to peatland fires
We provide empirical evidence that supports a commonly-held assumption: that experts’ appraisals of policy options are often very distinct from those of resource users most affected by those policy choices. We analyse perspectives about 40 policy options to address peatland fires in Indonesia, using a Q methodology approach to rank the options according to perceived effectiveness. Peatland fires in Indonesia are a long-standing and complex social-ecological challenge, where unsolved disagreements about policy options have profound implications for environmental governance, resulting in fires recurring and causing significant CO2 emissions and transboundary haze that affects the health of millions. We collected data from 219 respondents, covering twelve stakeholder categories, including small and large landholders, industrial farmers, scientists, local leaders and government officials. We identified the most representative response from each stakeholder category, and used hierarchical cluster analysis to explore the closeness/distance in perspectives among categories. The results show a particularly noticeable distinction between two broad groups, which we labelled as experts and resource users. Experts tend to prefer solutions that are centralised and largely transformative, whereas resource users favour more localised measures that are more compatible with business-as-usual. We discuss possible reasons for these differences, and their implications for environmental governance, including for how scientists engage in policy.
Incentive-based conservation in Peru: Assessing the state of six ongoing PES and REDD+ initiatives
Incentive-based conservation has gained ample notoriety over recent decades, particularly across Latin America where targeted incentives feature prominently in environmental services initiatives, such as for carbon storage or watershed regulation. Here we first develop an analytical framework for assessing the Peruvian initiatives of conservation incentives. We then identify six ongoing interventions that have introduced incentives conditional upon compliance with voluntary environmental commitments. We collected information from secondary sources and conducted semi-structured interviews with thirty national- and local-level stakeholders. We scrutinized the extent to which such initiatives featured impact-oriented design and implementation elements, as typically recommended in the state-of-the-art literature on Payment for Environmental Services (PES) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). We found only limited adoption of such recommendations, including spatial targeting, payment differentiation, enforced conditionality, and customized measures nurturing locally perceived equity and transparency. We argue, supported by a still incipient rigorous evidence from impact evaluations, that suboptimal design and implementation choices probably have influenced outcomes towards limiting the sought-for environmental and welfare impacts. We discuss three critical aspects for upscaling: overcoming financial and legal constraints, strategic involvement of non-government stakeholders, and more impact-oriented design of the interventions.