The design of competitive tenders to purchase environmental services requires judgements to be made about the funding scale and tender scope, with the latter incorporating considerations of geographic area, industries involved and the types of environmental outputs required. Increasing the scale...

Evaluating land use change in economic frameworks often requires non-market values to be assessed. However non-market valuation experiments can be sensitive to the way the trade offs are framed. The aim of the research reported in this paper was to examine the influence of varying the valuation...

Two choice modelling studies in Australia were designed to test for the effects of variations in geographic scale and scope on WTP values. One case study assessed values for improved natural resource management in a river catchment, and the other assessed values for improved protection of the...

There has been growing interest in the use of market-like instruments to achieve cost effective environmental outcomes, and a range of new tools are being explored. While competitive processes such as BushTender have been successfully designed to establish conservation contracts on private land,...

Assessing the value of ecosystem services in a particular area helps provide information about the economic benefits these services provide to the community. In many situations, to avoid the full cost of primary data collection, value estimates may be applied from secondary sources in a process...

Participation is a relative concept. Too much implies high costs of administration and many losers in a competitive process. Too little implies relatively few gains from trade are accessed. Thus the aim is to optimise rather than maximise participation. In this paper we outline some rules of...

Dryland salinity emergence is an important land degradation problem in Australia. Large areas of agricultural land where conventional crops and pastures are produced are at risk. The salinisation problem can be controlled by planting trees in conjunction with crops, but a disadvantage of growing...

Debt-for-nature swaps have been successfully applied in an international context to achieve nature conservation objectives in developing countries. The swap involves alleviating a country’s external debt burden in exchange for that country investing the equivalent amount of resources into...

Auctions are increasingly being considered as a mechanism for allocating conservation contracts to private landowners. This interest is based on the widely held belief that competitive bidding helps minimize information rents. This study constructs an agent-based model to evaluate the long term...