Farmers' preferences for result-based schemes for grassland conservation in Slovenia

Šumrada, Tanja (author), Japelj, Anže (author), Verbič, Miroslav (author), Erjavec, Emil (author)

Government-funded payments for ecosystem services (PES) have increasingly been used to facilitate transactions between users of environmental services and their providers. In order to improve the link between payments and the service provided, some countries in the EU have promoted result-based schemes (RBS), which remunerate farmers for ecological results, as part of their agricultural policy. Since PES programs are voluntary, it is important to understand farmers’ responses before more large-scale implementations of RBS are initiated. Using a choice experiment and a mixed logit model, we elicited the preferences of farmers in two Natura 2000 sites in Slovenia for different design elements of a hypothetical scheme for dry grassland conservation. We found that the majority of farmers preferred the result-based approach over the management-based scheme both in terms of payment conditions and monitoring; one group of farmers preferred the RBS very strongly (average WTA of more than 500 EUR/ha/yr) and another group less strongly (average WTA about 200 EUR/ha/yr). Farmers also showed a higher preference for on-farm advise and training in small groups than for lectures, which would be offered to a larger audience. A collective bonus, which would incentivise coordination and could potentially increase participation rates in the scheme, significantly influenced the farmers’ willingness to adopt the scheme. However, the estimated average WTA was comparable or lower than the 40 EUR/ha annual bonus payment. Older farmers and those who managed small and semi-subsistent farms were significantly more likely to be highly resistant to scheme adoption no matter its design.

• Language: English
• Keywords: payments for ecosystem services, agri-environmental measure, results-based scheme, collective bonus, biodiversity conservation, choice experiment
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: BF - Biotechnical Faculty; EF - School of Economics and Business
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: 12 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 66, art. 126143
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-134864
• UDC: 630*9
• ISSN on article: 1617-1381
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jnc.2022.126143
• COBISS.SI-ID: 96358403
• Publication date in RUL: 07.02.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Journal for nature conservation
• Shortened title: J. nat. conserv.
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 1617-1381
• COBISS.SI-ID: 336635

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Description: The most restrictive Creative Commons license. This only allows people to download and share the work for no commercial gain and for no other purposes.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: agrarna politika, kmetijstvo, subvencije, ekosistemske storitve, plačilo za ekosistemske storitve