The Challenges of Implementing Payment for Environmental Services to Prevent The Agricultural Land Conversion

<p>Payments for environmental services mechanism is expected to strengthen decisions of agricultural landowners to maintain the existence of their agricultural land. This mechanism is expected to prevent the conversion of land that occurs due to its lower appreciation compared to other uses. This study is aimed to critically examine the challenges of implementing payments for environmental services in Indonesia and strategies to improve the implementation of payments for environmental services schemes to reduce agricultural land conversion. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework is used to examine the implementation of Payments for environmental services. The implementation was able to run well through the establishment of institutions that regulate constitutional rules. The collaboration between the Government (as the user of environmental service) and farmers (as the service provider) should be declared and fully understood before the scheme is implemented. Therefore, full participation of all related parties was crucial in achieving the program’s goals. Collective understanding of the need to prevent land conversion and the coordination of stakeholders needs to be carried out sustainably.<br />Keywords: Land, conversion, environmental services, payment</p><p><strong><br /></strong></p><p><strong>Abstrak</strong></p><p><strong>TANTANGAN IMPLEMENTASI PEMBAYARAN JASA LINGKUNGAN UNTUK PENCEGAHAN KONVERSI LAHAN PERTANIAN</strong></p><p>Mekanisme pembayaran jasa lingkungan diharapkan dapat memperkuat keputusan pemilik lahan pertanian untuk mempertahankannya. Mekanisme tersebut diharapkan dapat mencegah konversi lahan yang terjadi akibat apresiasi terhadap lahan pertanian secara ekonomi lebih rendah dibandingkan dengan penggunaan lainnya. Kajian ini bertujuan untuk menelaah secara kritis tantangan implementasi pembayaran jasa lingkungan di Indonesia dan strategi meningkatkan implementasi skema pembayaran jasa lingkungan untuk mengurangi konversi lahan pertanian. Kerangka Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development digunakan untuk mengkaji implementasi pembayaran jasa lingkungan. Implementasi pembayaran jasa lingkungan dapat berjalan dengan baik melalui penetapan lembaga yang mengatur aturan konstitusional. Kontrak kerja sama antara pemerintah sebagai pengguna jasa lingkungan dengan petani sebagai penyedia jasa lingkungan harus disosialisasikan dan dipahami sebelum skema pembayaran jasa lingkungan dijalankan. Pelibatan partisipan secara penuh merupakan hal yang sangat penting dalam mencapai keberhasilan program. Pemahaman bersama tentang perlunya pencegahan konversi lahan dan koordinasi seluruh pemangku kepentingan terkait secara berkelanjutan sangat diperlukan.<br />Kata kunci: Lahan, konversi, jasa lingkungan, pembayaran</p>

Application of Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework in River Water Conservation in Southern Ecuador. Case Study—The Zamora River

Water is essential for life and human activities. In addition to the constant increase in water demand, there are problems caused by inefficient governance, such as the discharge of untreated wastewater into rivers and seas, which is aggravated by the limited participation of civil society in decision-making. To face current and future challenges, solid public policies must be implemented, focused on measurable objectives, following planned and predetermined schedules on an appropriate scale, based on a clear assignment of functions to the competent authorities, and subject to periodic monitoring and evaluation. The Institutional Analysis and Development framework proposed by Ostrom made it possible to identify gaps in the existing governance, and to establish actions that could strengthen the institutional framework with the active participation of social actors, in order to achieve an effective conservation of water resources in southern Ecuador. The present study determined that regulations are not coherent with the conflict, the design of policies, and the effects of decision-making. The formal rules for wastewater management are not applied, and there is an incipient citizen participation, as well as disarticulation in institutions responsible for wastewater management. Recommendations were made to strengthen the institutional framework and governance of wastewater.

Enabling Game-Theoretical Analysis of Social Rules

In the field of normative multiagent systems, the relationship between a game structure and its underpinning agent interaction rules is hardly ever addressed in a systematic manner. In this work, we introduce the Action Situation Language (ASL), inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework, to bridge the gap between games and rules. The ASL provides a syntax for the description of agent interactions, and is complemented by an engine that automatically provides semantics for them as extensive-form games. The resulting games can then be analysed using standard game-theoretical solution concepts, hence allowing any community of agents to automatically perform what-if analysis of potential new interaction rules.

Understanding the governance of sustainability pathways: Hydraulic megaprojects, social-ecological traps, and politicized networks of action situations

To enable robust and just sustainability pathways, we need to understand how social-ecological systems (SES) respond to different governance configurations, considering their historical, institutional, political and power conditions. We advance a robust methodological tool for the integrated analysis of those conditions, focusing on SES traps and building on an existing case study: the Doñana region (Guadalquivir estuary, SW Spain), an estuary-delta SES. Doñana is characterized by institutional rigidity for water resources and wetland conservation governance and, more generally, by a SES rigidity trap. Here, we focus on a relatively recent hydraulic megaproject involving deep dredging in the Guadalquivir estuary, finally canceled due to its broad negative socioeconomic and environmental repercussions. Our methodological development consists of a novel combination of the politicized version of the Institutional Analysis and Development (pIAD) framework and the Networks of Action Situations (NAS) approach. Our analysis reveals a governance configuration characterized by strategic interactions among key actors posing no new large socioeconomic or environmental risks in the short term. This pattern is however vulnerable due to an underlying coordination failure and sub-optimal equilibrium situation, which emerge from a pattern of uncooperative behavior that cannot be explained without considering discourse inertia and power dynamics. Deep dredging could have led to a sudden fall of governance into a below sub-optimal equilibrium and regime shift toward a lock-in trap posing high sunk and trajectory-shifting costs. Currently, the game is on for achieving a shift to a high ‘blue equilibrium’ and launching a robust sustainability pathway through collective action.

Institutional Conditions for Inclusive, Flood Resilient Urban Deltas: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Two International Resilience Programs in Southeast Asia

Policy makers in Southeast Asian flood-vulnerable regions are confronted with various institutional challenges when planning for inclusive flood resilience. This paper focuses on the role of international resilience programs and investigates how these programs can enable institutional transformation. The key question is which institutional conditions promote the development and implementation of inclusive flood resilience strategies by international resilience programs. The Mekong Delta Plan in Vietnam (MDP) and the Water as Leverage for Resilient Cities Asia (WaL) program in Semarang, Indonesia, are selected as the cases for a comparative analysis. To structure the comparative analysis of these programs, the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework is adopted and operationalized for the institutional analysis of inclusive flood resilience planning. The findings illustrate that whereas the MDP was able to involve decision makers from the national government and international financial institutions for mobilizing funding and technical support, the strength of the WaL program was its enabling environment for the cocreation of context-specific flood resilience proposals. Overall, this study concludes that the institutional conditions that enable project financing and the implementation of long-term and integrated flood resilience solutions are determined by engagement with national governments and by ownership of the solutions at both the national and local levels.

Analysis of an Urban Development Boundary Policy in China Based on the IAD Framework

Although urban growth control policies are widely adopted to help sustainable development in various countries, including China, few studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness and optimization of such policies in Chinese cities. Hangzhou, China, was chosen for this study as the research object, where the local authorities manage the urban sprawl via an urban development boundary policy. The institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework was employed to identify the conflicts between the central government and the local government as well as the developers and homebuyers in the formal/informal stage. The analysis shows that, with the implementation of the policy, problems such as fiscal crises, property inflation, and illegal construction will appear as a result of actors’ interactions. The study also highlights that industrial land transfer inside the boundary should be controlled in a reasonable range and that a land value tax should be introduced during the implementation of the urban development boundary policy.

Emerging knowledge commons in the public libraries in South Africa

PurposeThis study was aimed to examine emerging knowledge commons in the public libraries in the Thabo Mofutsanyane District in Free State, South Africa.Design/methodology/approachA triangulated sample survey was adopted to collect data from the users of the commons using a questionnaire, and data of community member and the library officers were collected using an interview schedule. The study was guided by Hess and Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework.FindingsThe librarians and the commons users recognise the changing nature, roles and services of the libraries without necessarily attributing the changes to the emergence of knowledge commons. Users viewed the commons by the learning opportunities offered by information and communication technologies. They were, however, willing to contribute their resources to boost and enrich the commons; their contributions presently take the forms of volunteering of their knowledge and skill through offering of training sessions to users of the commons. A critical aspect of the commons, namely, participation in the governance and management of the commons resources appears not to be occurring.Practical implicationsTo adequately build knowledge commons in the libraries will require formally introducing knowledge commons in the libraries, doing a systems analysis, deciding on the content and their sources, drawing up a programme for nurturing the system including training of relevant staff and then providing basic infrastructures.Originality/valueThis study used quantitative approach to deploy the institutional analysis development Institutional Analysis and Development framework in the study of public library institution. Studies on knowledge commons in public libraries have not been found.

Institutional analysis of top-down regulatory: evidence from Iran local governance

Population growth, along with climate change, has exacerbated the water crisis in local communities. The simplest and quickest response of governments to such problems is direct intervention in local governance. Such solutions are usually proposed without regarding the indigenous knowledge of the local people. These also include top-down policies on water issues, which disrupt local institutional arrangements and eliminate the possibility of collective action by stakeholders in reaching an agreement. A case study of one of the water basins in Chaharmahal Bakhtiari in Iran (the Gorgak River in Sureshjan city) using an institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework shows that in the past, people acted collectively to solve the asymmetric distribution and drought problem. But government intervention, which initially sought to improve water conditions, has disrupted the region's institutional arrangements and power asymmetries between exploiters. Our study used the IAD framework to examine changes in institutional arrangements due to the introduction of technology and government intervention by the game theory. It clarifies that government intervention in local institutional arrangements, even if designed with the intention of improving conditions, may lead to greater inequality due to disregarding physical and social conditions and local knowledge. This inequality can eventually worsen the situation.

Social, Economic, and Institutional Configurations of the Industrial Symbiosis Process: A Comparative Analysis of the Literature and a Proposed Theoretical and Analytical Framework

This paper aims at comparatively analyzing the IS process in three remarkable empirical cases. Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development framework and its categories for analysis are used to understand each process. A theoretical and analytical framework is proposed based on a survey of contextual elements that shaped the behavior of organizations towards Industrial Symbiosis practices. The results show that although there was no clear, linear order in which the actors developed symbiotic relationships, the decisions related to Industrial Symbiosis are shaped by a similar set of variables. These variables range from technical and economic aspects, such as the diversity of industries and the viability of exchanges, to social and institutional aspects, encompassing critical environmental issues; bilateral agreements; collective engagement; trust to build cooperative relationships; communication and information sharing strategies; integrated regulatory framework at three levels; congruence between government and company actions to create a cooperative environment; and governance structures involving local government, companies, research and development institutions, and a coordinating entity or the champion. This framework may serve as a reference for diagnostic analyses assessing aspects that can be improved wherein Industrial Symbiosis is already underway. It may also be useful in prescriptive analyses assessing the potential for implementing IS.