Aligning ‘public good’ environmental stewardship with the landscape-scale: Adapting MBIs for private land conservation policy

Benjamin Cooke and Katie Moon

Ecological Economics, 2015, vol. 114, issue C, 152-158

Abstract: Market-based instruments (MBIs) are rapidly becoming a dominant characteristic of the policy landscape for private land conservation in Australia and elsewhere. Price-based MBIs are considered attractive to landholders, who are provided with financial payments for the delivery of defined ecological outcomes on their land, and for policy-making, where ecological return on investment can be measured quantitatively. Consequently, MBIs are commonly used to promote competitive, individualized approaches to improve ecological values, framed around the property-scale. We are concerned that there is a tension between the property-centric focus of price-based MBI programs and the need for environmental management policy and practice to reflect landscape-scale social-ecological processes. Targeting MBI programs at individual properties could risk generating insufficient public good conservation benefits, if those programs fail to reflect the relationship between landscape-scale processes and property-scale conservation efforts. To remedy the neglect of the landscape scale in private land conservation MBI policy, we develop a definition of stewardship that directly connects landscape-scale ecological function to the ‘public good’ dimension of stewardship. We apply this over-arching definition to demonstrate how MBI programs can deliver on the goal of landscape-scale conservation, and to suggest when MBIs might not be well suited to achieving private land conservation objectives.

Keywords: Stewardship; Private land conservation policy; Market-based instruments; Public good; Landscape scale; Collaborative management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180091500155X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:114:y:2015:i:c:p:152-158

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.03.027

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().