Biodiversity loss is a serious global environmental problem. Economic instruments in biodiversity policies can contribute towards reconciling the conservation costs encountered at local level with the benefits of biodiversity conservation at higher levels of governance, from regional and...

A region of ecological importance which generates uncompensated cross-territorial positive spillovers has a comparatively higher fiscal need due to the direct and indirect costs it incurs for nature conservation. In order adequately to acknowledge fiscal needs relating to nature conservation, we...

Compensation schemes in which land owners receive payments for voluntarily managing their land in a biodiversity-enhancing manner have become one of the most important instruments for biodiversity conservation worldwide. One key challenge when designing such schemes is to account for the spatial...

Biodiversity loss in Europe is caused to a large extent by agricultural intensification. To halt this loss and to support species and habitat types in agricultural areas, agri-environment schemes have been introduced in Europe to compensate farmers for (costly) conservation measures. Currently,...

Land-use conflicts arise if land is scarce, land-use types are mutually exclusive, and vary in their effects with regard to more than one incongruent policy objective. If these effects depend on the spatial location of the land-use measures the conflict can be mediated through an appropriate...

Tradable permits have already been applied in many areas of environmental policy and may be a possible response to increasing calls for flexible conservation instruments which are able to successfully conserve biodiversity while allowing for economic development. The idea behind applying...

Participation is said to improve decisions on environmental conflicts. When investigating 16 case studies of participatory processes in European Water and Biodiversity Governance, which necessarily is multi-level, the picture becomes blurred: many different forms of participation can be...

Most problems related to biodiversity management have an ecological as well as a socio-economic dimension. Consequently, there has been a growing recognition that adequate management recommendations directed at such problems can only be developed if knowledge from ecology, economics and various...