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Publications (182)
This paper analyses two strategies to reduce the use of pesticides in grain production. We study Norwegian farmers' willingness to voluntarily forego income by reducing pesticide use as well as their responses to a doubling of the pesticide price (through increased pesticide taxes). We use mixed methods including an experiment, a survey and focus g...
Human behaviour is commonly optimised in economic models of adaptation to climate change. These models assume that people work to maximise profit, subject to financial and technological limitations. In effect, these models simulate adaptive potential. In reality, adaptation falls short of this potential. This shortfall is conceptualised as the adap...
Concerns for rural land policy have widened from a focus on food production to include many other critical values, recognised as ecosystems services. But our governance institutions have failed to reflect this. Brexit provides the UK with an opportunity to rethink the governance of rural land. This requires first an assessment of the rights and dut...
To find opportunities to improve performance, comparisons between farms are often made using aggregates of standard typologies. Being aggregates, farm types in these typologies contain significant numbers of atypical enterprises and thus average figures do not reflect the farming situations of individual farmers wishing to compare their performance...
Land policies around the world tend to focus on support for agricultural output. We argue that this leads to ineffective public expenditure, environmental harm and missed opportunities for the use of rural resources. Applying thinking centred on ecosystems services to the governance of rural land would secure greater social value.
To find opportunities to improve, in efficiency or performance, farms are often compared on the basis of standard typologies (i.e. categorisations). For example the EU "specialist-cereals-oilseeds-pulses" farm type, known in Britain as "cereals" farms. These categories, being aggregates, contain significant numbers of atypical enterprises. For exam...
The concept of adaptation constraints has become well known in the climate change literature. It describes impediments to the process of adaptation that could in principle be overcome but often are not. Many adaptation constraints have been identified and described in the literature across a wide range of contexts, and the importance of their influ...
We estimate the marginal returns to spending on Crop Variable Inputs (CVI) (such as fertilizers and crop protection), to explore whether observed spending maximises physical or economic returns to farmers. Data are taken from the Farm Business Survey for 2004-2013, where gross margins and input spending are available, in over 10,300 crops of conven...
The institutional change induced by payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes is a ‘messy’ process. The uptake and outcomes of PES schemes cannot be fully explained from a rational choice perspective. The notion of ‘institutional bricolage’ is needed to analyse how actors assemble or reshape their actions by combining new institutions such as a...
The institutional change induced by payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes is a ‘messy’ process. The uptake and outcomes of PES schemes cannot be fully explained from a rational choice perspective. The notion of ‘institutional bricolage’ is needed to analyse how actors assemble or reshape their actions by combining new institutions such as a...
There has been a growing interest across the British conservation community in
recent years in establishing conservation over large areas. Much of this thinking
was crystallised in the Making Space for Nature report (Lawton and others 2010)
, and has since become prominent in conservation policy. To maximise the success
of future projects, there is...
There has been a growing interest across the British conservation community in recent years in establishing conservation over large areas. Much of this thinking was crystallised in the Making Space for Nature report (Lawton and others 2010) , and has since become prominent in conservation policy. To maximise the success of future projects, there is...
Rural areas face increasing pressures to deliver both private and public goods from land management. Multiple stakeholders seek different outcomes and there is substantial heterogeneity in values. Trade-offs, synergies and complementarities exist between different services and alternative bundles of goods. The resulting complex social-ecological sy...
Drawing on a survey of large-scale ecological restoration initiatives, we find that managers face contradictory demands. On the one hand, they have to raise funds from a variety of sources through competitive procedures for individual projects. These projects require the specification of deliverable outputs within a relatively short project period....
Drawing on a survey of large-scale ecological restoration initiatives, we find that managers face contradictory demands. On the one hand, they have to raise funds from a variety of sources through competitive procedures for individual projects. These projects require the specification of deliverable outputs within a relatively short project period....
It is increasingly recognized that ecological restoration demands conservation action beyond the borders of existing protected areas. This requires the coordination of land uses and management over a larger area, usually with a range of partners, which presents novel institutional challenges for conservation planners. Interviews were undertaken wit...
Rural areas face increasing pressures to deliver both private and public goods from land management. Multiple stakeholders seek different outcomes and there is substantial heterogeneity in values. Trade-offs, synergies and complementarities exist between different services and alternative bundles of goods. The resulting complex social-ecological sy...
Conflicts over the conservation of biodiversity, changing patterns in land use, pollution, climate change, public access and increasing demands for food and energy security require policies to reconcile interests and promote society’s objectives for the countryside.
This book, published by Cambridge University Press, examines the origins and evol...
Europe is a region of relatively high population density and productive agriculture subject to substantial government intervention under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Many habitats and species of high conservation interest have been created by the maintenance of agricultural practices over long periods. These practices are often no longer p...
The delivery of ecosystems services and conservation of biodiversity relies on the control of rural land for the provision of public benefits. Much has been written about the progress of neoliberalisation, typically implying that land management decisions are increasingly being left to market forces. However, less has been made of the areas in whic...
Biodiversity conservation is a fundamentally spatial practice. For more than a century, conservation's leading strategy has been the establishment of protected areas. Governance by the state has been central to conservation's claim to territory. In the UK, the established approach to biodiversity conservation concentrated on spatial strategies of t...
Applying a difference-in-difference approach with propensity score matching, we examine the impact of participation in the Entry Level Stewardship (ELS) scheme on cereal farm incomes in eastern England. We assess the extent to which impacts are related to a) the source of income affected – whether only from agricultural or total business income; b)...
Early in 2011, the Government initiated a consultation on the potential sale of the Public Forest Estate in England. This proposal leads to vociferous negative public reaction and the consultation was withdrawn and an Independent Panel established. This paper reviews the arguments as to the options and appropriate institutional arrangements for for...
Political institutions are keen to use the best available scientific knowledge in decision-making. For environmental policy, relevant scientific evidence can be complex and extensive, so expert judgment is frequently relied upon, without clear links to the evidence itself. We propose a new transparent process for incorporating research evidence int...
A critical issue in behavioural environmental studies is the evolution of attitudes over time. This analysis reports a unique longitudinal study of individual farmers’ perspectives using Q methodology, with a group of UK farmers’ opinions assessed in both 2001 and 2008. Three main outcomes are evident. Firstly, the set of farmers’ perspectives iden...
To ensure a sustainable food supply for the growing population, the challenge is to find agricultural systems that can meet production requirements within environmental constraints and demands. This study compares the impacts of winter wheat production on energy use, land use and 100 years Global Warming Potential (GWP100) under different arable fa...
Organic farming practices have been promoted as, inter alia, reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. This meta-analysis systematically analyses published studies that compare environmental impacts of organic and conventional farming in Europe. The results show that organic farming practices generally have positive impacts on the environm...
In the context of rural land conservation, neoliberalisation involves an increasingly wide range of changes in formal and informal institutional arrangements. These affect the relationship between the state and the market in a variety of ways and have different implications for the governance of rural land. In the context of rural land conservation...
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is commonly used for comparing environmental impacts of contrasting farming systems. However, the interpretation of agricultural LCA studies may be flawed when the alternative land use options are not properly taken into account. This study compared energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) balances and biodiversity impacts of dif...
Governments are seeking to reduce levels of expenditure. In the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) it will be important to deliver the environmental objectives of agricultural policy more cost-effectively. This paper reviews the different agri-environmental mechanisms and their relative scale and performance. Likely reductions in the Si...
The payment of a compensation as a response to damage to livestock is a measure used by policy-makers to attenuate severe human–wildlife conflicts, which allows that economic burden to be shared with the rest of society. This study focuses on the case of wolf depredation on livestock in the county of Viana do Castelo, located in the north of Portug...
On 27 January 2011, the British Coalition Government launched a consultation on the future of the Public Forest Estate in England. Less than a month later, beset by protest, it changed its mind. What are the implications of this policy vortex for conservation? What are the prospects for England's forests?
Recent research on social and ecological resilience has recognised the importance of identifying opportunities in adversities, providing a wealth of theoretical knowledge; but empirical evidence remains a major gap not only for sustainability debates but also for focusing development objectives. The aim of this paper is to identify aspect of rural...
The continued growth of human populations and of per capita consumption have resulted in unsustainable exploitation of Earth’s
biological diversity, exacerbated by climate change, ocean acidification, and other anthropogenic environmental impacts. We
argue that effective conservation of biodiversity is essential for human survival and the maintenan...
1. The conservation of biodiversity depends upon both policy and regulatory frameworks. Here, we identify priority policy developments that would support conservation in the UK in the light of technological developments, changes in knowledge or environmental change.
2. A team of seven representatives from governmental organizations, 17 from non-go...
Agri-environment schemes were introduced in the mid-1980s. Their primary objectives have developed from initially aiming to hold back intensification towards stimulating environmental enhancement. The introduction of Entry Level Stewardship (ELS) in England represents a third stage in seeking to extend the coverage of schemes across the majority of...
Prospects for the management of rural land face particular uncertainties associated with future commodity prices, agricultural policy and climate change. Possible futures are considered through four scenarios relating to financial returns to land and government environmental policies. After discussing the characteristics of these scenarios, the imp...
This paper examines how opportunity costs of land use can be taken into account
when life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to compare environmental impacts of
contrasting farming systems. Energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) balances of organic,
conventional and integrated farm models are assessed. It is assumed that the farm size
and food product output...
In the past, evaluations of the transfer of agricultural land to other uses have generally failed to incorporate the issues of uncertainty and irreversibility into the analysis. This can lead to an overestimation of development values. The paper commences with a brief review of the approaches which have been adopted in the assessment of the loss of...
The changing technology of livestock production has led to an increase in the extent to which external costs are caused within the locality of the farm. While producers are constrained in a number of ways, their operations continue to give rise to concern. Survey results have suggested that a high proportion of livestock units in fact cause little...
Concern over the consequences of agricultural adjustment has been the focus of rural development policy for many years, yet conventional statistical indicators show little evidence of a problem. This paper, which is restricted to the United Kingdom experience, argues that the operation of the labour market in rural areas is different from that in u...
Jointness is a key attribute of multifunctionality. The first discussion of jointness in this context has been attributed by Nowicki (2004) to Harvey and Whitby (1988) who raise "the possibility of symbiosis between agriculture and the environment and the possibility of joint production of both environmental goods and services". However, as Nowicki...
Beyond money for nothing; beyond set‐aside?
Set‐Aside has been effective in educing supply. ‘Slippage’ has not been a major factor in the operation of the policy. However, set‐aside has not been cheap: the budgetary costs of set‐aside have exceeded the budgetary costs of dealing with surplus production via export subsidies in many years. Experience...
Recent changes to the framework of agricultural support, particularly the rising prominence of the ‘Second Pillar’ of the CAP, have stimulated an increasing interest in rural development policy, and consequently a need for better understanding of the processes it is designed to influence. The spatial diversity of rural economic activity, and a high...
Liberalisation of agricultural policies reduces the influence of policy on land-use decisions, but environmental policy objectives remain. Governance provides an approach that recognises the role of institutions and collective action. The formulation of environmental policy objectives in terms of the provision of public goods raises questions as to...
European agriculture is undergoing major institutional changes, which are of great relevance to our understanding of the role of agriculture in rural development. They are also taking place in contexts in which agricultural development seems to be continuing within the traditional modernisation paradigm. This is the case for agriculture in Spain. T...
The role of agriculture in rural areas is changing significantly in Europe, with environmental protection and enhancement, and provision of amenity and recreation increasingly emphasized both in public debate and in new policy initiatives. Faced by these shifting priorities, it is increasing important to understand how farmers themselves perceive t...
This paper addresses the issue of farmers’ views concerning the perceived legitimacy of environmental cross compliance as a governance mechanism. Recent work on the theory of regulation emphasises the importance of the legitimacy ascribed to a regulation in determining the effectiveness with which it can be implemented. The current study outlines a...
The debate on the relevance of monetary valuation of environmental goods has often hinged around the convergence of stated and revealed preferences, and in turn the actual money choices of respondents. In this paper, we report two separate experiments conducted in southeastern Nigeria to compare irrigators' stated willingness to pay for a river bas...
This paper examines the role of participation as a tool for improving individuals’ perceptions and environmental values using a test-retest experiment conducted in south-eastern Nigeria. Two identical contingent valuation experiments were interspersed by participatory workshops designed to involve respondents in framing and forming the valuation sc...
This study uses a linear programming approach to compare the potential effectiveness of uniform rules (under the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive) and a landscape-scale (a scale that includes different land-uses) based policy for reducing ammonia (NH3) emissions and their related impacts from an operating case-study poultry ins...
The distribution and impacts of different nitrogen pollutants are inextricably linked. To understand the problem fully, the interactions between the different pollutants need to be taken into account. This is particularly important when it comes to abatement techniques, since measures to reduce emissions of one nitrogen pollutant can often lead to...
The spatial distribution of nitrogen species (NH3, N2O, NO3-) varies widely in the countryside, and impacts depend on the respective location of sources (mainly agricultural activities) and sinks (semi-natural land). Impacts of NH3 and NO3- occur mainly at a local and regional level, while impacts of N2O emissions occur at a global level due to its...
Debate about rural policy is often based on persistent presumptions about conditions in ‘rural England’, generally associated with economic decline, low incomes, and a lack of services. Such generalisations are rarely justified for rural areas as a whole and we term them as ‘stylised fallacies’. The impression of their relevance is perpetuated by t...
Agricultural intensification by irrigation is increasingly regarded as the key to solving food supply problems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Conversely, mounting empirical evidence suggests that irrigation externalities might preclude long-term sustainability of arable agriculture. Choosing between intensive irrigation schemes and less intensive farming s...
The Delphi technique is a means of aggregating the judgement of a panel of experts in order to improve the quality of decision-making. This paper provides a case study of the technique by undertaking a three-round Delphi study to determine a package of best available techniques to reduce nitrogen emissions from a poultry unit under the Integrated P...
The Agenda 2000 reforms established a separate rural development policy, the second pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). This has received relatively limited funding to date, although there will be some increase following from the 2003 reforms of the CAP. This shift in approach towards a rural policy has been widely canvassed but slow to...
Concerns have been expressed with regard to the use of both single variables and indices in the assessment of disadvantage. In response, a 'bundles' methodology was adopted. Several variables were combined to define particular conditions acknowledged as representing the main elements posing a risk of disadvantage. Numbers of people facing these cir...
The present paper reviews the development of agri-environmental policy in Europe and assesses its prospects. While it does so from a predominantly UK perspective, there are many common features of the experience and policy choices across the majority of Member States. The first generation of agri-environmental measures applied command-and-control r...
We suggest an agri-environment programme of four elements, starting from an entry-level scheme to extend agri-environment coverage, to a fourth element featuring community involvement and connecting to a wider range of environmental measures.
Structural change in rural areas has led to a differentiation in the ranges of experience of rural life. Within generally prosperous localities, some individuals may be unable to achieve what is widely accepted as an adequate standard of living. This article focuses on the barriers that individuals face with respect to participation in residual loc...
