TITLE:
Enhancing the Social and Natural Capital of Canadian Agro-Ecosystems through Incentive-Based “Alternative Land Use Services” (ALUS) Programs: Recurring Themes and Emerging Lessons
AUTHORS:
Robert France, Jeffrey Campbell, Kate Sherren
KEYWORDS:
Agro-Ecosystem Services, Incentive Payments, Grassroots Participation, Natural and Social Capital
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.7 No.12,
December
23,
2019
ABSTRACT:
Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS) is an
incentive-based program established in Canada to pay farmers for their
voluntary delivery of ecosystem services (ES). All seven ALUS programs across
the country were examined using a standardized case-study approach based on
site visits, reading internal documents, attending program meetings, and
engaging in semi-structured interviews with program administrators,
participating farmers, and advisory board members. Direct content analysis was
used to highlight recurrent themes and emerging lessons in relation to the
salient particulars of program physical location, administration framework,
delivery of ES, and development and receipt by communities. Our three major
findings are: 1) Overall, ALUS has been judged by participants to be a very
successful program, whose strength is that it is completely voluntary,
non-permanent, and readily adaptable to each location’s environmental
conditions, economic funding base, and cultural milieu. 2) One serious
shortcoming of all ALUS programs is a general lack of quantifiable data on
their ability to increase ES. Instead, environmental benefits are either
assumed or based on the idea that the areal extent of enrolled land is the sole
measure of its environmental worth. 3) It may be that the social impact of ALUS
is its greatest success. In this regard, for farmers, it is the process of
engaging in land-use decision making and the recognition of their role as
environmental stewards that is a bigger motivation for participating in an ALUS
program than the modest financial incentives which they receive.