Project description
Growing our understanding of eco-initiatives
The European Union’s economic prosperity is linked to its natural environment. Eco-innovation and green technologies are at the heart of the European Union’s policies. To accelerate eco-innovation, EU member states implemented agri-environmental funding programmes and investment grants coupled with an increased number of environmental certification and labelling schemes established by private actors. The EU-funded EFFECT project will assess the success of these initiatives through a review of past successes and failures. It will also use the lessons learned from previous initiatives to design and test new forms of contracts. The results of the project will benefit the development of a new policy evaluation framework.
Objective
The European agricultural land areas provide important and valuable goods in the form of food, fibre and biomass for the world. They are also crucial for the provision of a number of environmental and climate goods and services. EU member states have implemented agri-environmental schemes, investment grants for environmental technologies, and private actors have established environmental certification and labeling schemes targeting these services. However, many initiatives are arguably not cost-effective in boosting environmental and climate service provision, may be skewed in terms of distributional impacts, increase risks to farmers, or involve excessive transaction costs. EFFECT will develop and pilot a theoretically well-founded and empirically well-adapted package of new contractual frameworks. This will enable farmers to reconcile agricultural production with enhanced delivery of environmental and climate public goods and services to the benefit of society at large. EFFECT pursues this through a transdisciplinary effort involving a review of past successes and failures; and development and test of new forms of contracts. We combine agricultural and environmental science knowledge with theoretical and empirical insights from law, political science and economics. We further combine efforts from researchers and multiple practice partners and stakeholders to ensure that lessons learned from previous initiatives and our testing of emerging contract frameworks are validated on the ground. Our ambition, which is based in the solid experience in the consortium, is to facilitate that our co-developed agri-environmental contract arrangements are being put to actual use towards the end of the project. Furthermore, to ensure durable impact of the project, EFFECT initiates a cross European innovation process, supports capacity building among decision making bodies and develops a policy evaluation framework.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
1165 Kobenhavn
Denmark
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Participants (21)
G12 8QQ Glasgow
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6708 PB Wageningen
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26900 Lodi
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25280 Solsona
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80333 Muenchen
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24118 Kiel
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51005 Tartu
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Participation ended
1609 KOBENHAVN
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NE1 7RU Newcastle Upon Tyne
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80100 Joensuu
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2100 Godollo
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9285 SN Buitenpost
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The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.
720229 Suceava
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08007 Barcelona
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61703 Tartu
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1115 Budapest
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Participation ended
24220 Flintbek
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505600 SACELE
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1093 Budapest
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1034 Budapest
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8200 Aarhus N
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