EFFECT

The trend of decline in biodiversity and loss in flora and fauna poses serious challenge to the governance of nature conservation in agricultural landscapes, and meeting environmental and climate targets remains among the most pressing European policy issues. Agriculture mainly provides prEFFivate goods – such as food and biomass – but can deliver also a variety of public goods and ecosystem services – such as biodiversity conservation. However, phenomena like soil erosion and habitat loss can reduce the capacity of producing high quality ecosystem services. In response to these challenges, diverse agri- environment schemes (AES) have been initiated, with the aim of fostering agricultural ecosystem service delivery.

The overarching objectives of the EFFECT project will be to develop a theoretically well-founded and empirically well-adapted package of new contractual frameworks, enabling farmers to reconcile agricultural productivity with enhanced delivery of environmental and climate public goods and services to the benefit of society at large.

The EFFECT project will consider delivering ecosystem services as a principal-agent problem and will use insights from institutional analysis and collaborative governance theories to assess under which institutional conditions contractual arrangements can be successful.

This research is financed by the Horizon2020 programme and is a consortium of universities, research centers and stakeholders from all over Europe.

Specifically, work package 3 of EFFECT project will achieve insights on how the immediate and broader institutional contexts enable and constrain the design and implementation of innovations aimed at delivering eco-services of high quality.

For more information, visit http://project-effect.eu/