Institutional analysis of actors involved in the governance of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes

authored by

Claudia Sattler, Rena Barghusen, Birte Bredemeier, Céline Dutilly, Katrin Prager

Abstract

In this study, we used institutional analysis to investigate the design of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes. The aim of such contracts is to better incentivize farmers for the provision of environmental public goods in comparison to current ‘mainstream’ contracts. For the analysis, we differentiated four contract types: result-based, collective, land tenure, and value chain contracts. To represent each type in the analysis, we selected 19 case examples from six European countries. Cases were identified through a mix of methods, combining literature review, web search, and expert consultation. After a structured data collection based on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, we focused our analysis on the involved actors and their roles in contract governance. Our results highlight the great diversity of public, private, and civil actors involved from the local, regional, national or international governance level, each performing one or several critical roles in contract governance. We found that it is highly context-dependent which actors assume certain roles. We also discuss how provision of environmental public goods through the contracts might potentially be impacted by certain roles and their assignment to specific actors.

The corresponding dataset is available at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7806103.

Organisation(s)

Institute of Environmental Planning

External Organisation(s)

Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF)
French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD)
University of Aberdeen

Type

Article

Journal

Global Environmental Change

Volume

80

ISSN

0959-3780

Publication date

05.2023

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Geography, Planning and Development, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Global and Planetary Change, Ecology

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 13 - Climate Action

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102668 (Access: Open)