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...

This report constitutes the main deliverable of WorkPackage 2 of GoverNat, "Assessing multilevel activities in water and biodiversity governance", dealing with an assessment of state-ofthe- art European water and biodiversity governance, based on the analysis of a series of casestudies developed...

Legitimacy is regarded as one critical aspect of biodiversity management and nature conservation arrangements. Multi-level governance is claimed to pose several challenges to legitimacy. The aim of this paper is to review some legitimacy challenges in multilevel governance contexts, and to...

Issues related to the cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation policies have not yet been prominent in European conservation research and policy-making. Nevertheless, there is a small but growing literature which analyses such cost-effectiveness issues on both a conceptual and an applied...

The European Union's Council Regulation (EC) No 1698/2005 on support for rural development by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development has introduced promising changes in rewarding farmers by the implementation of conservation auctions and granting farmers' transaction costs. The...

In this paper part of the existing Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) of the European Union are evaluated by using data on county level instead of applying field studies. The attempt is made to disentangle the effects of AES on land management practice as well as land use on biodiversity. It is...

This paper analyses the role of palm oil and its sustainability from different perspectives. We consider the role of palm oil within the GHG context. We discuss the impact of palm oil on biodiversity and analyse how palm oil can contribute to economic growth and development in tropical...