PROVIding smart DElivery of public goods by EU agriculture and forestry (H2020-ISIB-2014-633838).
The PROVIDE project seeks to provide a conceptual basis, evidence, tools and improved incentive and policy options to support the «smart» provision of public goods by the EU agriculture and forestry ecosystems, in the light of trade-offs and conflicts brought about by prospective intensification scenarios, using a transdisciplinary approach.
PROVIDE will consider a wide range of public goods, including the scope for intensification to produce negative externalities, in relation with a wide set of legislations. It will address the issue in a multi-scale framework working both at the EU level and at case study level in thirteen Countries of the EU. The practical results of the project will be: a renewed («un-packed») conceptualization of the notion of public goods; an operational framework to support the smart provision of public goods; a toolbox putting together an inventory/mapping of options, operational means for valuation and evaluation, and a selection of evaluated policy/sector mechanisms; a consolidated and long-lasting community of knowledge and practice.
The project will achieve the above results through a mapping and inventory of public goods and the mechanisms producing such goods, allowing to identify ‘hotspots’ for mechanisms and policy development. Around these ‘hotspots’, the project will then value different public goods and explore value transferability across several regions and ecosystems. Next, to meet a smart production of public goods, consistent with the current needs of productivity, bioeconomy strategy and rural development, innovative policy tools and mechanisms will be comparatively assessed and evaluated. The outcomes of these activities will feed information into the framework and toolbox.
All these processes will be co-developed with stakeholders, so that the framework and toolbox will be a co-constructed product allowing incremental development also beyond the lifetime of the project, maximizing PROVIDE’s impact.
General objectives
The objective of the PROVIDE project is to develop a conceptual basis, evidence, tools and improved incentive and policy options to support the «smart» provision of public goods by the EU agriculture and forestry ecosystems. PROVIDE will consider a wide range of public goods and legislations, and will address the issue in a multi-scale framework, working both at the EU level and at case study level in thirteen countries of the EU.
Role of the University of Cordoba
UCO leads Work Package 4 (WP4), entitled «Improve valuation of public goods». WP4 targets objective 3 of the project, which is to develop and test improved tools for valuing costs and benefits of public goods in support to policy and other governance mechanisms. The specific objectives of WP4 are to:
- To select the most adequate valuation and scale approaches for each of most relevant public goods pointed out in WP3 (task 4.1);
- To adapt valuation approaches chosen to different local conditions (concrete agricultural and forestry ecosystems) (task 4.2);
- To test the suitability all of the approaches chosen in a real setting both, for local public goods to be valued at ecosystem level and global public goods to be valued at EU scale and to implement valuation exercises of public goods at ecosystem (local public goods) and EU (global public goods) scales (task 4.3);
- To analyse the determinants of values in view of using values for mechanism evaluation (task 4.4)
- To test if value transferability is feasible considering different environmental and social factors (task 4.5);
- To report the lessons learned in form of guidelines as input for policy making (task 4.6).