Project: Civil-public-private-partnerships (cp³): collaborative governance approaches for policy innovation to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services delivery in agricultural landscapes
Agricultural landscapes are predominant across Europe and deliver a multitude of ecosystem services (ES) essential to sustain biodiversity and human life on earth. As of yet, there is still a mismatch between the spatial and temporal levels that are relevant for effective ES provision, including agricultural food production, and biodiversity protection and the ones of established governance structures that are meant to safeguard these ES. Current governance approaches mostly include command and control type arrangements valid for different administrative units in the EU (e.g. Natura 2000 network, Water Framework Directive). This is supplemented by incentive and market based approaches for individual farmers, such as agri-environmental schemes as part of the CAP. However, these approaches are often ineffective, because they are too short-term, scattered across the landscape and not well matched to the spatial and temporal processes corresponding to flows of ecosystem benefits between ES providers and beneficiaries. The proposed project will investigate governance models that go beyond command and control or market-based approaches. The focus will be on collaborative governance approaches involving partnerships between actors from all spheres of society, including state, market and civil society. Innovative governance models will include partnerships, where local stakeholders participate in the design of the models, social entrepreneurs or technological innovators from the market sector are involved, or citizens take on the role of monitors as lay experts through honorary work. The objectives of the proposed research are, to: - Identify, describe, and analyze such collaborative governance models that are successful in providing an institutional fit between the level of governance and the required spatial and temporal scales necessary to reach specific ES, food production and biodiversity targets - Identify, describe and analyze agricultural production practices linked to the different governance models and explore their relations to ES, food production and biodiversity targets, including existing trade-offs and synergies - Develop an inventory of ES provided by and needed to sustain agro-ecosystems, including spatial and temporal scales of delivery, and ES flows - Derive recommendations for stakeholders, i.e. policy makers, market actors, civil society initiatives, farming community, how development of such collaborative governance models can be supported by specific policies and administrative conduct. The methodological approach requires inter- and trans-disciplinary research involving natural and social scientists cooperating closely with stakeholders from practice and the policy domain who are involved in the development of the collaborative governance models. The project focusses on three selected case studies representing different governance models in agro-ecosystem management for effective ES provision, agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. To ensure transfer of generated knowledge to end-users, i.e. project stakeholders, scientific community, general public, research outcomes will be disseminated through different communication channels, e.g. scientific publications, project website, social media, and other user-group-tailored materials.
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