标题：Enhancing the Social and Natural Capital of Canadian Agro-Ecosystems through Incentive-Based “Alternative Land Use Services” (ALUS) Programs: Recurring Themes and Emerging Lessons
期刊名称：Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection
印刷版ISSN：2327-4336
电子版ISSN：2327-4344
出版年度：2019
卷号：7
期号：12
页码：139-162
DOI：10.4236/gep.2019.712010
语种：English
出版社：Scientific Research Pub
摘要：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.
关键词：Agro-Ecosystem ServicesIncentive PaymentsGrassroots ParticipationNatural and Social Capital
