Paolo Melindi-Ghidi

Global scientific research commons under the Nagoya Protocol: Towards a collaborative economy model for the sharing of basic research assets

Highlights • Develops a collaborative economy model for sharing research materials for biodiversity research.• Presents a world-wide survey on collaborative practices in global research for sustainability.• Shows the limits of relying on internalized motivations only to build a collaborative economy.• Provides inputs for the implementation of the Nagoya Protocol for non-commercial research.

The Role of Network Bridging Organisations in Compensation Payments for Agri-Environmental Services under the EU Common Agricultural Policy

Compensation payments to farmers for the provision of agri-environmental services are a well-established policy scheme under the EU Common Agricultural Policy. However, in spite of the success in most EU countries in the uptake of the program by farmers, the impact of the scheme on the long term commitment of farmers to change in their practices remains poorly documented. To explore this issue, this paper presents the results of semi-structured field interviews and a quantitative survey in the Walloon Region of Belgium. The main finding of this study is that farmers who have periodic contacts with network bridging organisations that foster cooperation and social learning in the agri-environmental landscapes show a higher commitment to change. This effect is observed both for farmers with high and low initial intrinsic motivations for biodiversity. Support for network bridging organisations is foreseen under the EU Leader program and the EU regulation 1306/2013, which could open-up interesting opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness of the current payment scheme for agri-environmental services.

Networked innovation and coalition formation: the effect of group-based social preferences

ABSTRACT In this paper, we study the production and dissemination of public knowledge goods, such as technological knowledge, generated by a network of voluntarily cooperating innovators. We develop a private-collective model of public knowledge production in networked innovation systems, where group-based social preferences have an impact on the coalition formation of developers. Our model builds on the large empirical literature on voluntary production of pooled public knowledge goods, including source code in communities of software developers or data provided to open access data repositories. Our analysis shows under which conditions social preferences, such as ‘group belonging’ or ‘peer approval’, influence the stable coalition size, as such rationalising several stylized facts emerging from large-scale surveys of open-source software developers, previously unaccounted for. Furthermore, heterogeneity of social preferences is added to the model to study the formation of stable but mixed coalitions.