The financial resources needed for globally implementing the Aichi Biodiversity Targets have been estimated at US$ 150-440 billion per year (CBD COP11, 2012) - of which only a fraction is currently available. Significant efforts have been undertaken in many countries to increase funding for...

Practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, land management, and biodiversity conservation are increasingly interested in using economic instruments that promise "win-win" solutions for conservation and human livelihoods. However, practitioners often lack guidance for selecting and...

Participation is said to improve decisions on environmental conflicts. When investigating 16 case studies of participatory processes in European Water and Biodiversity Governance, which necessarily is multi-level, the picture becomes blurred: many different forms of participation can be...

As economic incentives for biodiversity and ecosystem service protection (e.g., payments for ecosystem services) have become widespread in environmental science and policy, a major concern among conservationists and environmental scientists is that economic incentives may undermine people's...

Nature conservation scientists and practitioners have voiced the concern that a conservation discourse based on economic arguments and monetary valuation may undermine conservation efforts by eroding ("crowding out") the influence of other arguments for nature conservation. This paper presents...

Governance has definitely become a very iridescent concept in recent years. The term is widely used, meanwhile, in almost all social-science disciplines as well as in the political process. The intention of this paper is not so much to clarify these sometimes vague meanings but to highlight some...