PhD Project Summary
| Name | Mr Ulf NARLOCH |
|---|---|
| PhD Title | Payment for agrobiodiversity conservation services: how to make incentive mechanisms work for conservation |
| Project information | Despite their contribution to important agrobiodiversity conservation services, many plant and animal genetic resources (PAGR) are increasingly under threat. So-called payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services (PACS), as a subcategory of agricultural-related Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), would seek to tackle market price distortions associated with the public good characteristics of genetic diversity by increasing the private benefits from utilizing neglected PAGR on-farm. Significant challenges, however, appear with regard to (i) hardly any experience in the application of PES-like schemes in the context of agrobiodiversity conservation thus far, as well as (ii) significant research gaps in how to make PES-like incentive mechanisms work for conservation in an effective, efficient and equitable way. This PhD research attempts to contribute to filling some of these research gaps by drawing on fieldwork from two sites in the Andes: one Bolivian site with increasingly commercialized farming systems and one Peruvian site with mostly subsistence-based crop production. Based on data from methods that have hardly been applied for the assessment of PES, namely a framed field experiment and a group-level conservation auction, I seek to reveal (1) patterns of collective action in conservation, (2) the pathways through which PES interact with these institutions, thereby affecting conservation behaviour, (3) cost-effectiveness trade-offs under multiple conservation goals, and (4) the interrelationship of alternative equity principles to be taken into account in the targeting of conservation payments. |
| Supervisor | Dr Unai Pascual (EEP) |