Subsistence-based and natural resource-dependent societies are especially vulnerable to climate change. In such contexts, food security needs to be strengthened by investing in the adaptability of food systems. This paper looks into the role of agrobiodiversity conservation for food security in...

Policy makers aiming to get private landholders to provide non-marketed environmental services need to provide efficient economic incentives. Two ideas have been explored to achieve this: linking contract payments to environmental outcomes and putting the contracts up for tender. This paper...

Building on available theory, this work uses controlled laboratory experiments to investigate the budgetary and the economic performance of competitive tenders for allocating conservation contracts to landholders. Experiments have been replicated in two different countries to check for...

We use an extended partial equilibrium trade model to derive optimal environmental policy responses to tariff reduction requirements and assess the impact of such policies on the welfare of trading partners. We find that countries which attribute preferential political weights to farmers'...

Buying environmental services from private landholders using auction mechanisms often involves repeated multi-unit procurement-type auctions. These can either be target-constrained or budget-constrained. Most of the theoretical literature has focused on the former, whereas government agencies...

Buying environmental services from private landholders using tendering mechanisms are usually subject to a budget constraint. Auction theory has mostly focused on target-constrained auctions and is less well developed for this type of auction. This paper examines a theoretical model specifically...

Policy makers aiming to get private landholders to provide non-marketed environmental services need to provide efficient economic incentives. Two ideas have been explored to achieve this: linking contract payments to environmental outcomes and putting the contracts up for tender. This paper...

This paper employs the concept of technology efficiency to analyse the optimal degree of specialisation of organic arable farms. Based on bookkeeping data from 461 organic farms, three technology specific frontiers (each representing a different degree of specialisation)and an all-encompassing...

The present paper reviews the development of agri-environmental policy in Europe and assesses its prospects. While it does so from a predominantly UK perspective, there are many common features of the experience and policy choices across the majority of Member States. The first generation of...

We argue that previous assessments of discriminatory-price conservation auctions may have systematically overestimated their performance relative to uniform-payment schemes due to an inappropriate counterfactual comparison. We demonstrate that the cost curve (and not the bid curve) is the...