Comprendere la governance degli strumenti basati sul mercato nei servizi ecosistemici: Prospettiva comparativa tra UE e Cina

In recent decades, Payment for ecosystem services (PES) have been increasingly applied all over the world to enhance the provision of ES. As ES usually have public goods characteristics and nature conservation has always been challenging, payments are made to ES providers to stimulate greater ES flows through PES. The overarching aim of the thesis is to understand governance of PES schemes in different contexts and further shed lights on environmental governance in EU and China. As PES is normally seen as a market-based instrument (MBI), this thesis initially provides a comprehensive literature review on MBI, in particular related to forest carbon mechanism. Through a systematic literature review, this study mapped global empirical patterns of MBIs targeted at forest ecosystems, identified policy design features of mechanisms and uncovered the role of institutions in the governance of MBIs. Europe and China were identified as main players in the review. Following that, spatial regression analysis was employed to investigate two public PES programs under different socioeconomic settings and institutional arrangements, through the forestry measure of the EU’s Rural Development Programme (RDP) at the programming level and the Grain for Green Program (GFGP) at the subnational level in China. Comparative insights were derived from policy objectives, measures taken, actors involved, expenditure patterns, and empirical factors that influence two programs’ funding allocations, including socio-economic farmer attributes, land-use/land-cover indicators, and environmental, socioeconomic and political contextual settings. This study also examined the governance of PES from top-down to bottom-up perspective, and from national programs to local initiatives. Taken China’s GFGP as an example, a choice experiment was conducted with GFGP participants to investigate their willingness to stay or leave a follow-up PES program, with changes to policy design. In this regard, special attention was paid to planting approaches, as the current GFGP program takes monoculture planting approach, which largely disregards forest biodiversity. Therefore, this study provided policymakers with empirical evidence about transitioning ES providers from monoculture to mixed-species planting. The tradeoff among PES program attributes and determinants of farmers’ decisions to stay were also examined. This thesis is not only grounded in the discipline of economics, but also incorporates insights from political science. The last paper investigated the application of PES approach in Italy and Germany. We conducted policy document analysis and described institutional context of PES schemes using construct from the framework. Through semi-structured interview, we identified key actors involved in PES as well as their roles, rights and responsibilities. The results of the studies highlight the MBIs targeted at forest carbon are very heterogenous. Public institutions play diverse roles in forest carbon mechanisms and they are going to play an increasing role in the future climate policy arena. In the Paper II, the results unraveled that biophysical-environmental context emerged as a vital determinant of forestry budget allocations, particularly for RDP in the EU. RDP forestry subsidies prioritized ES associated with biodiversity, while GFGP emphasized watershed services. Paper III revealed that majorities of farmers are willing to stay when policy design changes, and those who choose to leave tend to have smaller cropland area, larger household size, lower total income, and higher non-agricultural income. Farmers’ preferences for PES program attributes are heterogeneous. Through Paper Ⅳ, we found out PES has gained a lot more attention in official policy documents along these years, but this concept is still very ambiguous: additionality, permeance and voluntariness are not specified in some policy documents.