European Agroforestry Conference. 3rd. Book of Abstracts

Agroforestry is considered nowadays as a sustainable form of land management that is being promoted by different global institutions like FAO and its Global Alliance Smart Climate Agriculture to mitigate and adaptate to Climate change. The European Commission through the protection of landscape features, greening and Rural Development Programs is promoting the essential presence of woody vegetation across Europe, but in a way that is difficult to recognize by farmers. AGROFE and AGFORWARD projects are both demonstrating the important value of Agroforestry at European level, which together with EURAF are pushing European Commission to include measures enhancing Agroforestry. However, there is a need of a European Agroforestry Strategy that recognizes the drawbacks of Agroforestry to be implemented at European level. This strategy should include the main mechanisms to show farmers how to implement it and at the same time to get funded for the important ecosystem services that they provide when implementing agroforestry. AGFORWARD project has identified the main agroforestry practices in Europe, highlighting silvopasture, but showing the importance that others forms of agroforestry have to play like homegardens with multipurpose trees, or the adequate improvement of fallow lands where woody vegetation can enhance the levels of organic matter in the soil if adequately managed. AGFORWARD also shows the lack of information of the real implementation of agroforestry practices like forest farming, in spite of the important productive and ecosystem benefits it provides. EURAF through the participation in the different civil dialogue groups (CAP, Direct Payments and Greening, Forestry and Cork, Organic Farming, Arable, Environment and Climate Change and Rural Development) has included and promoted agroforestry within the European Agenda. The role of Agroforestry has been also enhanced in the Groups of experts of European Structural and Investments funds and as part of the European Network for Rural Development and its derived groups: innovation, evaluation and CLLD/LEADER. EURAF is pleased to announce that Agroforestry will be discussed as part of a focus group of the European Innovation Partnership, so, apply and join the group. This book represents the lastest findings on agroforestry in Europe, integrating the participation of researchers but also policy makers and farmers and farmers' associations. It was a pleasure for EURAF to integrate all this needed knowledge to be disseminated at European levels. On behalf of EURAF, I wish all of you a successful meeting and invite you to strengthen agroforestry within the different European Union countries when you go back home. Rosa Mosquera-LOSADA President of EURAF

"Policy externalisation" inherent failure : international financial institutions' conditionality in developing countries

Conditionalities – i.e. ‘exchanging finance for policy reform’ in an asymmetrical relationship between the ‘donor’ and the ‘recipient’ – are central mechanisms of the reform programmes of international financial institutions (IFIs). As they are imposed by outside entities, they can also be viewed as ‘policy externalisation’, which is paradoxically a massive intrusion in the shaping of a country’s domestic policies. The resilience of such devices is remarkable, however. Indeed, in the early 1980s, many developing countries were facing balance of payments difficulties and called upon these international financial institutions for financial relief. In exchange for this relief, they devised economic reforms (fiscal, financial, monetary), which were the conditions for their lending. These reforms were not associated with better economic performance, and this led the IFIs to devise in the 1990s different reforms, which this time targeted the functioning of the government and its ‘governance’, economic problems being explained by governments’ characteristics (e.g., rent-seekers). The paper demonstrates the limitations of the device of conditionality, which is a crucial theoretical and policy issue given its stability across time and countries. These limitations stem from: i) the concept of conditionality per se - the mechanism of exchanging finance for reform; ii) the contents of the prescribed reforms given developing countries economic structure (typically commodity-based export structures) and the weakness of the concept of ‘governance’ in view of these countries’ political economies; and iii) the intrinsic linkages between economic and political conditionalities, whose limitations thus retroact on each other, in particular regarding effectiveness and credibility.