FAO.org

The State of Food and Agriculture 2007 explores the potential for agriculture to provide enhanced levels of environmental services alongside the production of food and fibre. The report concludes that demand for environmental services from agriculture – including climate change mitigation, improved watershed management and biodiversity preservation – will increase in the future, but better incentives to farmers are needed if agriculture is to meet this demand. As one among several other possible policy tools, payments to farmers for environmental services hold promise as a flexible approach to enhancing farmer incentives to sustain and improve the ecosystems on which we [...]

The rules and enforcement mechanisms that guide and coordinate people’s behaviour have become central issues in international development cooperation. Understanding the governance framework is a precondition for successful projects and programmes also when dealing with sustainable management of natural resources. GTZ has been working in this area long before this term came to the fore. Not incidentally, governance is GTZ’s annual theme in 2004. Relative to purely technical aspects, the political and the institutional dimensions of its practical work have grown to be more and more prominent. Hence, it seems all the more important to share our experiences in governance [...]