Effectiveness and synergies of policy instruments for land use governance in tropical regions

By Eric F. Lambin, Patrick Meyfroidt, X. Rueda, Allen Blackman, J. Börner, P. Cerutti, T. Dietsch, L. Jungmann, P. Lamarque, Jane Lister and 2 more. 2014

469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Land use is regulated through various mixes of command-and-control interventions that directly affect land use via land use restrictions, and other public interventions that indirectly affect land use via agricultural, forestry, trade or macro-economic policies. More recently, coalitions of public and private actors have designed market-based and/or demand-led policy instruments to influence land use—e.g., eco-certification, geographical indications, commodity roundtables, moratoria, and payments for environmental services. These innovative instruments fall along a continuum of state involvement and interact with traditional public forms of land use regulation, leading to “hybrid” interventions. This article reviews emerging evidence on the effectiveness of the main instruments used to promote sustainable land use, and explores interactions between the new demand-led interventions and formal regulatory public policies. Although there are still insufficient rigorous studies evaluating the effectiveness of hybrid instruments, available evidence suggests some positive direct and indirect benefits. Hybrid instruments combine elements from both private and public regulatory systems, in innovative and effective ways. We propose a typology to characterize potential interactions between instruments that regulate land use. It links various types of interactions—i.e., complementarity, substitution, and antagonism—to the various stages of regulatory processes—i.e., agenda setting, implementation, and monitoring and enforcement. We give examples of governments endorsing certifications or using certification to support their own policies; governments creating enabling conditions for hybrid instruments to mature, allowing for wider adoption; and private instruments reinforcing public regulations or substituting for missing or weak governance. In some cases, governments, NGOs and corporations compete and may hinder each other's actions. With favourable institutional and governance contexts, well-designed hybrid public-private instruments can be effective. More systematic evaluation could boost the effectiveness of instruments and enhance synergistic interaction with traditional public land-use policy instruments to achieve incremental benefits as well as longer-term transformative outcomes in land-use protection.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5343e8af9e5955381fce1971f8aa3567101e7834

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Trading forests: land-use change and carbon emissions embodied in production and exports of forest-risk commodities (2015, background): “A key avenue for future research in this area is therefore how these different types of policy interventions interact [89, 90], in order to understand how demand-side policies can best be used to leverage support for other regulatory (supplyside) forest conservation policies.”
Deforestation displaced: trade in forest-risk commodities and the prospects for a global forest transition (2019, background): “We hope that the data presented here can facilitate policy to that end, be it through private supply-chain sustainability initiatives [54], public forest conservation policy, or a mix of the two [55].”
Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, background): “…can align to develop supply chains interventions and territorial trans-scalar land use planning processes that incorporate actors and stakes across scales in order to make these trade-offs between local livelihoods and global challenges apparent (Lambin et al. 2014, Rudel and Meyfroidt 2014).”
Mainstreaming Impact Evaluation in Nature Conservation (2016, background): “Empirical evidence is even more sparse on the effectiveness and implementation costs of other large and small scale conservation policy instruments, such as forest law enforcement, PES schemes, eco-certification, and Integrated Conservation and Development (ICDP) approaches that dominate public and ”
Approaches and terminology for causal analysis in land systems science (2016, background): “More recently, emerging phenomena such as land grab, biofuels or private-sector led and hybrid forms of land use regulations (Lambin et al., 2014) forced a rethink of the theories and knowledge about land change processes.”