Tobias Wünscher

Combining auctions and performance-based payments in a forest enrichment field trial in Western Kenya

Cost-effectiveness is an important aspect in the assessment of payments for environmental services (PES) initiatives. In participatory field trials with communities in Western Kenya, we combined procurement auctions for forest enrichment contracts with performance-based payments and compared the outcomes with a baseline scenario currently used by the Kenyan Forest Service. Procurement auctions were the most cost-effective. The competitive nature of the auction reduced contracting expenses (provision costs), and the result-oriented payments provided additional incentives to care for the planted seedlings, resulting in their improved survival rates (service quantity). These gains clearly exceeded increases in transaction costs associated with conducting an auction. The number of income-poor auction participants and winners was disproportionately high and local institutional buy-in was remarkably strong. Our participatory approach may, however, require adaptations when conducted at a larger scale. Although the number of contracts we monitored was limited and prohibited the use of statistical tests, our study is one of the first to reveal the benefits of using auctions for PES in developing countries.

Enhancing resilience to climate shocks through farmer innovation: evidence from northern Ghana

In this paper, we contribute to recent attempts to operationalize the measurement of climate resilience by measuring household resilience to climate shocks and by assessing the role of farmer innovations in enhancing climate resilience. Adapting the Food and Agriculture Organization’s resilience tool, we develop a household resilience index using survey data from rural farm households in northern Ghana. The index consists of six components and 23 indicators and was constructed using two indicator-weighting approaches. The proposed resilience index is a simple tool that can be used to quantitatively assess the resilience of households to the incidence of climate shocks and to monitor interventions aimed at building rural household resilience to unpredictable shocks. The results indicate that farm households in the study region are weakly resilient to climate shocks. We also show that farmers go beyond adoption of externally driven technologies to develop their very own innovations, and these innovations contribute significantly to enhancing household resilience to climate shocks. Using propensity score matching method, we found that farmer innovators are about 6% more resilient to climate shocks than non-innovators. This result is robust to alternative weighting approaches and matching algorithms, and also to hidden bias. The paper concludes that policy efforts aiming at enhancing farm households’ resilience to climate shocks should consider providing support for farmers’ innovations.

Identification and Acceleration of Farmer Innovativeness in Upper East Ghana

The generation of innovations has traditionally been attributed to research organizations and the farmer’s own potential for the development of innovative solutions has largely been neglected. In this chapter, we explore the innovativeness of farmers in Upper East Ghana. To this end, we employ farmer innovation contests for the identification of local innovations. Awards such as motorcycles function as an incentive for farmers to share innovations and develop new practices. The impact of Farmer Field Fora is evaluated by matching non-participants to participants using propensity scores of observable characteristics. The results indicate that farmers do actively generate and test innovative practices to address prevalent problems. Moreover, this innovative behavior can be further stimulated by Farmer Field Fora, which were tested to significantly and positively affect innovation generation.