REDD+ and community-controlled forests in low-income countries: any hope for a linkage?

Deforestation and forest degradation are estimated to account for between 12% and 20% of annual greenhouse gas emissions and in the 1990s (largely in the developing world) released about 5.8 Gt per year, which was bigger than all forms of transport combined. The idea behind REDD + is that payments for sequestering carbon can tip the economic balance away from loss of forests and in the process yield climate benefits. Recent analysis has suggested that developing country carbon sequestration can effectively compete with other climate investments as part of a cost effective climate policy. This paper focuses on opportunities and complications associated with bringing community-controlled forests into REDD +. About 25% of developing country forests are community controlled and therefore it is difficult to envision a successful REDD + without coming to terms with community controlled forests. It is widely agreed that REDD + offers opportunities to bring value to developing country forests, but there are also concerns driven by worries related to insecure and poorly defined community forest tenure, informed by often long histories of government unwillingness to meaningfully devolve to communities. Further, communities are complicated systems and it is therefore also of concern that REDD + could destabilize existing well-functioning community forestry systems.

Implementing REDD through community-based forest management: lessons from Tanzania

REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation) aims to slow carbon releases caused by forest disturbance by making payments conditional on forest quality over time. Like earlier policies to slow deforestation, REDD must change the behaviour of forest degrading actors. Broadly, it can be implemented with payments to forest users in exchange for improved forest management, thus creating incentives; through payments for enforcement, thus creating disincentives; or through addressing external drivers such as urban charcoal demand. In Tanzania, community-based forest management (CBFM), a form of participatory forest management, was chosen by the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group, a local NGO, as a model for implementing REDD pilot programmes. Payments are made to villages that have the rights to forest carbon. In exchange, the villages must demonstrably reduce deforestation at the village level. In this paper, using this pilot programme as a case study, combined with a review of the literature, we provide insights for REDD implementation in sub-Saharan Africa. We pay particular attention to leakage, monitoring and enforcement. We suggest that implementing REDD through CBFM-type structures can create appropriate incentives and behaviour change when the recipients of the REDD funds are also the key drivers of forest change. When external forces drive forest change, however, REDD through CBFM-type structures becomes an enforcement programme with local communities rather than government agencies being responsible for the enforcement. That structure imposes costs on local communities, whose local authority limits the ability to address leakage outside the particular REDD village.

'Score it upon my taille': the use (and abuse) of tallies by the medieval Exchequer

The paper traces the evolution of the tally from a receipt for cash payments into the treasury, to proof of payments made by royal officials outside of the treasury and finally to an assignment of revenue to be paid out by royal officials. Each of these processes is illustrated by examples drawn from the Exchequer records and explains their significance for royal finance and for historians working on the Exchequer records.

An interdisciplinary modelling approach asessing the cost-effectiveness of agri-environmental measures on reducing nutrient concentration to WFD thresholds under climate change: the case of the Louros catchment

The application of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) in the European Union (EU) targets certain threshold levels for the concentration of various nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous being the most important. In the EU, agri-environmental measures constitute a significant component of Pillar 2—Rural Development Policies in both financial and regulatory terms. Environmental measures also are linked to Pillar 1 payments through cross-compliance and the greening proposals. This paper drawing from work carried out in the REFRESH FP7 project aims to show how an INtegrated CAtchment model of plant/soil system dynamics and instream biogeochemical and hydrological dynamics can be used to assess the cost-effectiveness of agri-environmental measures in relation to nutrient concentration targets set by the WFD, especially in the presence of important habitats. We present the procedures (methodological steps, challenges and problems) for assessing the cost-effectiveness of agri-environmental measures at the baseline situation, and climate and land use change scenarios. Furthermore, we present results of an application of this methodology to the Louros watershed in Greece and discuss the likely uses and future extensions of the modelling approach. Finally, we attempt to reveal the importance of this methodology for designing and incorporating alternative environmental practices in Pillar 1 and 2 measures.

Deforestation, leakage and avoided deforestation policies: a spatial analysis

This paper analyses the impact of several avoided deforestation policies within a patchy forested landscape. Central is the idea that deforestation choices in one area influence deforestation decisions in nearby patches. We explore the interplay between forest landscapes comprising heterogeneous patches, localised spatial displacement, and avoided deforestation policies. Avoided deforestation policies at a landscape level are respectively: two Payments for Environmental Services (PES) policies, one focused on deforestation hotspots, the second being equally available to all agents; a conservation area; and, an agglomeration bonus. We demonstrate how the "best" policy, in terms of reduced leakage, depends on landscape heterogeneity. Agglomeration bonuses are shown to be more effective where there is less landscape heterogeneity, whilst conservation areas are most effective where there is more spatial heterogeneity.

Legal and regulatory barriers to effective public-private partnership governance in Kazakhstan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical assessment of legal and regulatory impediments to effective governance of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Kazakhstan. Design/methodology/approach – The qualitative study develops propositions from the PPP literature and then tests them against findings from in-depth interviews. Interviewees have been selected by a purposeful sampling from PPP projects in Kazakhstan as well as from national and regional PPP centres. Findings – The identified barriers to effective PPP management include irregularities in the PPP legal framework, such as lack of legal definition of a PPP and controversy with the government guarantee’s legal status for its long-term payments to partnerships; bureaucratic tariff setting for partnership services; non-existent opportunity for private asset ownership; and excessive government regulation of PPP workers’ wage rates. Practical implications – The partners’ opposing perspectives on a number of PPP issues show that management needs to identify and carefully reconcile stakeholder values in a partnership in order to achieve more effective PPP governance. Practitioners, particularly those in the public agencies, have to be concerned with ways to reduce the government overregulation of the private operators, which is likely to result in greater PPP flexibility in management and, ultimately, higher efficiency in delivering the public services. Originality/value – By elucidating multiple examples of overregulation and PPPs’ inefficiency, the paper demonstrates that the government dominance in PPP management is conceptually inappropriate. Instead, the government should adopt the concept of co-production and manage its relations with the private sector partner in a collaborative fashion.

Profits, malversations, restitutions. Les bénéfices des financiers durant la guerre de la Ligue d’Augsbourg et la taxe de Chamillart

Profit, embezzlement, restitution. The role of the traitants in the Nine Years War and Chamillart’s tax on financial benefits The aim of this article is to revisit the question of the financiers in Old Regime France. It starts with an analysis of the discourses about the financiers under the Absolute monarchy that underlines the complexity of their relationship with the government and the public. It then reviews the secondary literature and highlights the existence of competing historical interpretations (functional, political, utilitarian), which raise the question of their overall capacity to account for the role and impact of the financiers at different times. On this ground, the article focuses on a specific group of financiers, the so-called traitants d’affaires extraordinaires, during the Nine Years War. Further to a description of the specific role and scope of the activities of the various financiers responsible for helping the monarchy to raise the funds it needed to pay for its peace and wartime expenditure, the article examines the conditions and profits granted by the king in his contracts with the traitants whose services were hired for the purpose of selling royal offices in the public and advancing the revenue to the Treasury. It also explores the contractual arrangements of the companies established by the financiers to manage their operations as well as the rights and the responsibilities of their various stakeholders. These bases being laid, the article relies on the administrative correspondence relating to the traités during the Nine Years War to address a range of issues, in particular the extent to which these contracts, and other control procedures, were robust enough to deter fraud. The accounts of two traitants’ companies offer an opportunity to analyse and compare the structure of their income and expenditure (including the volume and cost of the promissory notes sold in the public to finance their payments to the Treasury), to explore the strategies of the contractors, to calculate their net profits and further discuss the problem of embezzlement. The article ends with the study of the context and debates which led to the introduction by finance minister Michel Chamillart, in 1700, of a shortfall tax on the financial profits of the gens d’affaires or traitants, the method used to determine its rate (50 % of the net benefits), its distribution among the various stakeholders (including the bailleurs de fonds or backers), and the related procedures. In total, the article argues that the relationship between the monarchy, society and the financiers under the Ancien Regime was not static and, therefore, suggests that the broad question of control and fraud must be examined against changing circumstances. With regard specifically to the Nine Years War, the article concludes that within the constraints of the Absolute monarchy, contractors offered valuable services by raising capital for the benefit of a king who ruled over a country which, at the time, was by far the wealthiest in Europe, and where ministers failed to foresee long wars of attrition and whose financial strategy was limited by the very existence of privilege. Overall, the traités were too costly to be a viable system of war financing. In these conditions, the substantial fortunes made by a handful of very successful traitants suffice to explain that the government easily gave in to public criticism against the wealth of the financiers and felt compelled, when peace resumed, to cancel the advantageous conditions offered in the treaties by taxing financial profits.

Variation on the effects of the 2003 CAP reform and regional differences in the Italian olive oil sector

This paper analyses the impacts of the 2003 CAP reform on the production of Italian olive oil controlling for the regional differences in olive oil production as well as for the differences between years. Italian olive oil production time series data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network for the 2000-2010 period at regional level is used to examine the effect of the 2003 Fischler reform on the production of olive oil. Production costs and payments received by farmers to support their income are considered. The data were collected at micro level based on a sample of farms representative of the production systems in the country. In order to consider the differences in production among the regions, eight representative regions in terms of surveyed farms are considered: Liguria, Toscana, Umbria, Lazio, Campania, Calabria, Puglia and Sicilia. We found that the most important factors affecting the production of olive oil are the area under olive groves and labour productivity. Results also show no evidence that the level of payments have an impact to the level of production, however, the type of payments has. Future work should explore the impact of the 2003 reform into the technical and production efficiency of the Italian olive oil farmers. It would be interesting to link the measures introduced by the cross compliance and the management practices of the different farms to have a more complete picture of the various parameters influencing the production of olive oil.

Do investors care about corporate tax?

This paper conducts a comprehensive examination of the link between corporation tax payment and financial performance in the UK. We find no discernible link between tax rates and stock returns for the UK, no matter how tax payment is measured. This is true throughout the sample period and for both customer-facing and non-customer-facing companies. However, allowing for industry norms and a host of firm characteristics, companies with lower effective tax rates have significantly higher levels of stock market risk. Firms that are reported in the newspapers in a negative way in relation to their level of corporation tax payment experience small negative stock returns, which are partially reversed within a month. However, the initial negative effects and subsequent rebound are both more pronounced for smaller companies. News announcements of the potential involvement of a firm in a corporate inversion (expatriation) result in steeper and much longer-lasting falls in share prices, whereas news stories of a more general nature relating to a firm's tax avoidance or tax payments have little noticeable effect.

Resource-dependent livelihoods and the natural resource base

The natural resource base, terrestrial and marine, provides rural households in lower-income countries with income, food, shelter, and medicines, which are variously gathered and hunted in common lands and waters. These resources may be actively managed, whether by the government or local community; or may be de facto open access, with little effort by governments to prevent what may be de jure illegal extraction. This paper provides an appraisal of the literature that encompasses the direct value of wild resources to rural households; the extent to which these resources mitigate poverty and inequality; and the importance of the institutional context. The literature is increasingly addressing competing demands on the resource base both to support nearby livelihoods, and to enhance ecosystem services such as biodiversity; and how initiatives such as community-based payments for ecosystem services are changing how people interact with the resource base.