The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations provide normative orientation for many national and regional governments as well as actors from industry and other parts of the civil society. There is growing consensus that the corresponding transformation processes needed...

Competitive bidding is considered to be a cost-effective allocation mechanism for payments for ecosystem services. This article shows that competition is not a necessary condition for sustaining cost-effectiveness in the long run. In a repeated conservation auction, learning, specific...