Browsing by Author "Ferraro, Paul J."

Now showing 1 - 16 of 16
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    Aligning evidence generation and use across health, development, and environment
    Tallis, Heather; Kreis, Katharine; Olander, Lydia P.; Ringler, Claudia; Ameyaw, David; Borsuk, Mark E.; Fletschner, Diana; Game, Edward; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Jeuland, Marc; Kennedy, Gina; Masuda, Yuta J.; Mehta, Sumi; Miller, Nicholas; Parker, Megan; Pollino, Carmel; Rajaratnam, Julie; Wilkie, David; Zhang, Wei; Ahmed, Selena; Ajayi, Oluyede C.; Alderman, Harold; Arhonditsis, George; Azevedo, Ines; Badola, Ruchi; Bailis, Rob; Balvanera, Patricia; Barbour, Emily; Bardini, Mark; Barton, David N.; Baumgartner, Jill; Benton, Tim G.; Bobrow, Emily; Bossio, Deborah; Bostrom, Ann; Braimoh, Ademola; Brondizio, Eduardo; Brown, Joe; Bryant, Benjamin P.; Calder, Ryan S. D.; Chaplin-Kramer, Becky; Cullen, Alison; DeMello, Nicole; Dickinson, Katherine L.; Ebi, Kristie L.; Eves, Heather E.; Fanzo, Jessica; Ferraro, Paul J.; Fisher, Brendan; Frongillo, Edward A.; Galford, Gillian; Garrity, Dennis; Gatere, Lydiah; Grieshop, Andrew P.; Grigg, Nicola J.; Groves, Craig; Gugerty, Mary Kay; Hamm, Michael; Hou, Xiaoyue; Huang, Cindy; Imhoff, Marc; Jack, Darby; Jones, Andrew D.; Kelsey, Rodd; Kothari, Monica; Kumar, Ritesh; Lachat, Carl; Larsen, Ashley E.; Lawrence, Mark; DeClerck, Fabrice; Levin, Phillip S.; Mabaya, Edward; Gibson, Jacqueline MacDonald; McDonald, Robert; Mace, Georgina; Maertens, Ricardo; Mangale, Dorothy; Martino, Robin; Mason, Sara A.; Mehta, Lyla; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth; Merz, Barbara; Msangi, Siwa; Murray, Grant; Murray, Kris A.; Naude, Celeste E.; Newlands, Nathaniel K.; Nkonya, Ephraim; Peterman, Amber; Petruney, Tricia; Possingham, Hugh; Puri, Jyotsna; Remans, Roseline; Remlinger, Lisa; Ricketts, Taylor H.; Reta, Bedilu; Robinson, Brian E.; Roe, Dilys; Rosenthal, Joshua; Shen, Guofeng; Shindell, Drew; Stewart-Koster, Ben; Sunderland, Terry; Sutherland, William J.; Tewksbury, Joshua; Wasser, Heather; Wear, Stephanie; Webb, Chris; Whittington, Dale; Wilkerson, Marit; Wittmer, Heidi; Wood, Benjamin DK K.; Wood, Stephen; Wu, Joyce; Yadama, Gautam; Zobrist, Stephanie (Elsevier, 2019-08-01)
    Although health, development, and environment challenges are interconnected, evidence remains fractured across sectors due to methodological and conceptual differences in research and practice. Aligned methods are needed to support Sustainable Development Goal advances and similar agendas. The Bridge Collaborative, an emergent research-practice collaboration, presents principles and recommendations that help harmonize methods for evidence generation and use. Recommendations were generated in the context of designing and evaluating evidence of impact for interventions related to five global challenges (stabilizing the global climate, making food production sustainable, decreasing air pollution and respiratory disease, improving sanitation and water security, and solving hunger and malnutrition) and serve as a starting point for further iteration and testing in a broader set of contexts and disciplines. We adopted six principles and emphasize three methodological recommendations: (1) creation of compatible results chains, (2) consideration of all relevant types of evidence, and (3) evaluation of strength of evidence using a unified rubric. We provide detailed suggestions for how these recommendations can be applied in practice, streamlining efforts to apply multi-objective approaches and/or synthesize evidence in multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary teams. These recommendations advance the necessary process of reconciling existing evidence standards in health, development, and environment, and initiate a common basis for integrated evidence generation and use in research, practice, and policy design.
  • Asymmetric information and contract design for payments for environmental services
    Ferraro, Paul J. (Elsevier B.V., 2008)
    This article addresses the informational rents that are created in payments for environmental services (PES) contracts by asymmetric information between landowners and conservation buyers. Three options for reducing informational rents are described and compared: 1)gathering information on compliance costs, 2)screening contracts, and 3)procurement auctions.
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    Asymmetric information and contract design for payments for environmental services
    Ferraro, Paul J. (2005)
    In contractual relationships involving payments for environmental services, conservation buyers know less than landowners know about the costs of contractual compliance. Such asymmetric information reduces the effectiveness of payment schemes and increases the expense to implement them. To reduce these negative effects, conservation agents can take three approaches: (1) acquire information on observable landowner attributes that are correlated with compliance costs; (2) offer landowners a menu of screening contracts; and (3) allocate contracts through procurement auctions. Although current theory and empirical work provides practitioners with some insights into the relative merits of each approach, more theoretical work and experimentation in the field is necessary before definitive conclusions can be drawn.
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    Asymmetric information and contract design for payments for environmental services
    Ferraro, Paul J. (2005)
    In contractual relationships involving payments for environmental services, conservation buyers know less than landowners know about the costs of contractual compliance. Such asymmetric information reduces the effectiveness of payment schemes and increases the expense to implement them. To reduce these negative effects, conservation agents can take three approaches: (1) acquire information on observable landowner attributes that are correlated with compliance costs; (2) offer landowners a menu of screening contracts; and (3) allocate contracts through procurement auctions. Although current theory and empirical work provides practitioners with some insights into the relative merits of each approach, more theoretical work and experimentation in the field is necessary before definitive conclusions can be drawn.
  • Cost-effective conservation: A review of what works to preserve biodiversity
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Simpson, R. David (Resources for the Future (RFF), 2001)
    This article discusses different approaches to biodiversity conservation, advocating for the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of direct payments over indirect payments. It is important to consider not only the theoretical differences but also the lessons revealed from implementation of both direct and indirect approaches. There are multiple options for financing conservation; innovative approaches are not necessarily better than more traditional financing methods. Although conservation schemes that promise more leverage for less money sound appealing, they likely will not deliver the expected outcomes. There is a cost to conserving biodiversity and, with few exceptions, the most cost-effective conservation is through direct payments.
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    The cost-effectiveness of conservation payments
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Simpson, R. David (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)
    International donors invest billions of dollars to conserve ecosystems in low-income nations. The most common investments aim to encourage commercial activities, such as ecotourism, that indirectly generate ecosystem protection as a joint product. We demonstrate that paying for ecosystem protection directly can be far more cost-effective. Although direct-payment initiatives have imposing institutional requirements, we argue that all conservation initiatives face similar challenges. Thus conservation practitioners would be well advised to implement the first-best direct-payment approach, rather than a second-best policy option. An empirical example illustrates the spectacular cost savings that can be realized by direct-payment initiatives.
  • Direct payments to conserve biodiversity
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Kiss, A. (2002)
    International donors and private citizens have invested billions of dollars to protect biodiversity in developing nations. The most popular investments aim to encourage economic activities that indirectly protect ecosystems and species. An alternative form of investment is to pay directly for conservation outcomes, as is commonly done in high-income nations. While not a "silver bullet," direct approaches may, in many cases, be more effective and efficient than indirect ones, and thus merit greater attention in developing nations.
  • The economics of conservation investments
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Simpson, R. David (2002)
    International donors invest billions of dollars to conserve ecosystems in low-income nations. An emerging debate rages among academics and practitioners as to the most effective forms of conservation investment. Among the more popular initiatives to achieve this objective is the use of development interventions in the peripheral areas of endangered ecosystems. Such interventions indirectly provide desirable ecosystem services through two mechanisms: (1) by re-directing labor and capital away from activities that degrade ecosystems (e.g., agricultural intensification); and (2) by encouraging commercial activities that supply ecosystem services as joint products (e.g., ecotourism). We contrast this dominant approach with an approach that pays for ecosystem protection directly. Based on theoretical and empirical analyses, we argue that investments aimed at making payments that are conditional on conservation performance are likely to be far more cost-effective than the currently popular indirect approaches to conservation investment. Although direct payment initiatives have imposing institutional requirements, we argue that all conservation initiatives face similar challenges. An empirical example from Africa illustrates the substantial cost savings that can be realized by direct payment initiatives.
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    Habitat Conservation: The dynamics of direct and indirect payments
    Conrad, J. M.; Ferraro, Paul J. (2001)
    This paper examines the dynamic efficiency of direct and indirect payments for habitat conservation, as well as the preferences of donors who make the payments. A direct (or performance) payment is an annual payment to a landowner based on the number of hectares of undisturbed habitat that the landowner has preserved. An indirect payment is an annual payment to a landowner that subsidizes the use of other, non-habitat, inputs to an "eco-friendly" activity (e.g., eco-tourism). Direct payments are dynamically efficient. They can achieve a desired level of preserved habitat at lower levels of the other, non-habitat, inputs. Direct payments, however, may not be preferred by the donor who funds the conservation effort. The analytical model is calibrated to the Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar. For the amount of funds invested in Ranomafana by international conservation organizations, direct payments generate dramatically lower costs for the conservation agent and higher profit levels for the rural residents who control the fate of the ecosystem.
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    Money for nothing? A call for empirical evaluation of biodiversity conservation investments
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Pattanayak, S. K. (2006)
    For far too long, conservation scientists and practitioners have depended on intuition and anecdote to guide the design of conservation investments. If we want to ensure that our limited resources make a difference, we must accept that testing hypotheses about what policies protect biological diversity requires the same scientific rigor and state-of-the-art methods that we invest in testing ecological hypotheses. Our understanding of the ecological aspects of ecosystem conservation rests, in part, on well-designed empirical studies. In contrast, our understanding of the way in which policies can prevent species loss and ecosystem degradation rests primarily on case-study narratives from field initiatives that are not designed to answer the question "Does the intervention work better than no intervention at all?"
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    Payments for hydrological services in Africa
    Ferraro, Paul J. (2007)
    Compared to other regions of the world, Africa has much less watershed-based PES activity. This presentation summarizes existing and proposed initiatives on the continent, contrasts them with initiatives taking place in other parts of the world, and speculates about reasons for Africa's lower level of watershed-based PES activity.
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    Payments for Watershed Services: Regional syntheses
    Dillaha, Theo A. III; Ferraro, Paul J.; Huang, M.; Southgate, Doug; Upadhyaya, S. K.; Wunder, Sven (SANREM CRSP, OIRED, Virginia Tech, 2007)
    This brief is a synthesis of the three regional reviews of Payments for Watershed Services (PWS) that were developed for Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Payments for Watershed Services and PES are used somewhat interchangeably, but it should be recognized that PWS is actually a subset of PES where watershed services are at least one of the environmental services being targeted. This research brief provides an overview of the following PWS/PES issues if they could be characterized for the region:
  • Protecting forests and biodiversity: Are investments in eco-friendly production activities the best way to protect endangered ecosystems and enhance rural livelihoods?
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Simpson, R. David (AB Academic Publishers, 2005)
    A debate has been raging in recent years among conservation practitioners and advocates. What are the most effective mechanisms for preserving the imperiled forest habitats that shelter most of the world's terrestrial biodiversity? In the past few decades most money has been going into "indirect" interventions such as "Integrated Conservation and Development Programs". While no one could object to efforts to achieve such worthy goals, several authors suggest that more "direct" approaches - payments in exchange for conservation performance - would better achieve conservation objectives. We argue here that direct incentives might better achieve both conservation and development objectives. While the problems facing both conservation practitioners and development specialists are indeed daunting, we feel that the arguments for direct approaches are compelling both as conceptual propositions and as practical policy advice.
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    Protecting forests and biodiversity: Are investments in eco-friendly production activities the best way to protect endangered ecosystems and enhance rural livelihoods?
    Ferraro, Paul J.; Simpson, R. David (2003)
    In the next section (II), we describe the economics of direct and indirect approaches to protecting ecosystems and biodiversity. In sections III-V, we address common criticisms of direct payment approaches and attempt to answer the question, 'If direct approaches are more desirable, why have indirect approaches been more commonly employed in recent years?' In section VI, we offer a brief review of how direct payments are working in practice around the world.
  • Regional review of Payments for Watershed Services: Sub-Saharan Africa
    Ferraro, Paul J. (Taylor & Francis, 2009)
    This paper reviews both current and proposed Payment for Watershed Services (PWS) initiatives in Africa, evaluating the factors that have limited the development of PWS schemes in the region (in comparison to Latin America). Poverty alleviation is usually a primary goal of African PWS schemes, often a priority above the provision of watershed services. Consequently, there are higher transaction costs and decreased watershed service provision with these PWS schemes.
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    Regional review of payments for watershed services: Sub-Saharan Africa
    Ferraro, Paul J. (Blacksburg, Va.: SANREM CRSP, OIRED, Virginia Tech, 2007)
    Although there has been global experimentation with Payments for Watershed Service (PWS) schemes for almost a decade, only a couple of schemes exist in Africa. The two African PWS programs that are currently making payments are both located in South Africa. As described below, these two programs have characteristics that are unusual when compared to PWS schemes in Latin America and Asia: they are essentially public works programs oriented towards securing hydrologic services. Given that the most common definitions of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) in the literature do not include such public works programs (e.g., Wunder, 2007; Ferraro, 2001), one could reasonably argue that there are no PWS schemes currently operating in Africa.