Incentivizing sustainable production practices: improving and scaling extension, certification, carbon markets and other incentive systems

Publication date: 23/11/2020
Extent: 20 pages

Contributions by: Christine Negra, Versant Vision LLC, USA; and Tanja Havemann, Clarmondial AG, Switzerland

Chapter synopsis: In the absence of subsidies and secure land ownership, farmers often have weak incentives to adopt sustainable production practices. Potential means to change that include improved extension services, certification schemes, access to finance, and results-based payments (e.g. for carbon offset credits). This chapter highlights such incentive systems and reviews major implementation challenges and underlying drivers. It offers guidance on how to improve and scale incentive systems, emphasizing research models, targeting, adaptive implementation strategies, and generic objectives paired with advanced monitoring. The chapter closes with a discussion of future trends including recent studies that enrich the foundation for assessing impact and designing incentive schemes for smallholder adoption of sustainable production practices.

DOI: 10.19103/AS.2020.0080.19