Abstract
A growing body of literature shows that full-cooperation among farmers to manage productive ecosystem services would yield gains with respect to uncoordinated approaches. The public good feature of these ecosystem services may, however, hinder the emergence of a cooperative solution at the landscape scale. In this paper, we introduce in a coalition formation game a spatially-explicit bioeconomic model of fruit pollination, where pollinaton depends on the distance to the choosen location of natural habitats. We analyse: (i) which coalitions are stable; (ii) what benefits they provide; (iii) how cooperation depends on the initial landscape structure; and (iv) how policy instruments affect cooperation. The theoretical model presents the rationality of cooperation but, due to the detailed heterogeneity and complex spatial interactions among farms, we use a numerical example to determine the stable coalitions. We find that only small coalitions are stable and that the benefits of cooperation decrease when the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase. Policy instruments can increase the interest for cooperation but per-hectare payments and minimum participation rules may reduce the habitat area at the margin (by decreasing the stability of coalitions). Price premium for the coalition members increase the habitat area but its budget-effectiveness decreases as the spatial autocorrelation of fruit tree covers increase.
Highlights
The conservation of biodiversity and related ecosystem services (ES) depends on the structure of landscapes, which are the results of landowners’ land-use decisions (Haines-Young and Potschin 2010)
We examine three different instruments that are often implemented in the USA and Europe: (i) individual homogeneous per-hectare payments; (ii) minimum participation rules (MPR), where a bonus is paid to each coalition member if the total habitat area exceeds a given threshold; and (iii) price premiums for fruits when pollinators are managed in common
Agricultural production depends on the provision of productive ES that, in turn, are affected by the landscape-scale land use decisions of the same farmers that benefit from them
Summary
The conservation of biodiversity and related ecosystem services (ES) depends on the structure of landscapes (e.g., density and spatial autocorrelation of natural habitats), which are the results of landowners’ land-use decisions (Haines-Young and Potschin 2010). Since the provision of many productive ES depends on mobile “ES providers”, such as pollinators or pest-predatory insects, farmers’ land-use choices may, create positive externalities for neighbouring farmers (Bareille et al 2020; Costello et al 2017) In this context, cooperation among farmers to manage productive ES is likely to be an efficient strategy for farmers. Simulations based on bioeconomic models show that, the cooperation of all farmers in a landscape (i.e. the Grand Coalition – GC) yields Pareto improvements with respect to the uncoordinated ES management (the Nash Equilibrium – NE), but that at least some farmers have incentives to defect (Cong et al 2014; Epanchin-Niell and Wilen 2015) These incentives are even more pronounced when farmers are heterogeneous (Atallah et al 2017; Bareille et al 2020). Olson (1965) though postulated that small groups would be more likely to cooperate as the free-riding problem they face is less signficant
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