Recommendations for assessing instruments in policy mixes for biodiversity and ecosystem governance. Policymix WP 2

This POLICYMIX Technical Brief summarises the main lessons learned from the international review of policy instruments for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision, as published in POLICYMIX Report Issue No. 2 “Instrument Mixes for Biodiversity Policies” (Ring and Schröter-Schlaack 2011). For a full understanding of the findings of WP2 “Review of instruments and their roles in a policy mix” we refer to this report that provides a detailed review of various frameworks for policy mix analysis (Ring and Schröter-Schlaack 2011) and a more detailed outline of our suggested POLICYMIX framework for the analysis of economic instruments in policy mixes for biodiversity and ecosystem governance (Schröter-Schlaack and Ring 2011). This report also provides thorough reviews of the following policy instruments including first assessments of their roles in a policy mix: direct regulation (Schröter-Schlaack and Blumentrath 2011), offsets, habitat banking and tradable permits (Santos et al. 2011), tax reliefs (Oosterhuis 2011), ecological fiscal transfers (Ring et al. 2011), payments for environmental services (Porras et al. 2011), REDD and REDD+ (Chacón-Cascante et al. 2011) as well as forest certification (Kaechele et al. 2011). This Technical Brief also represents POLICYMIX Deliverable D2.2 “Recommendations for multi-scale assessments of instruments and their transferability”. The recommendations serve as a starting point for the assessment of the transferability of impact assessment methods as developed by WPs 3-6 and policy lessons from the case studies (WPs7-8). Therefore, this Technical Brief tries to go beyond the report mentioned above, and includes a first and rough sketch of possible empirical approaches for assessing instruments in policy mixes (section 5) as well as a short discussion of relevant issues to consider in multilevel assessments of instruments in policy mixes (section 6) as they are currently planned for the POLICYMIX case studies. This latter part of the Technical Brief is clearly work in progress and will be substantially developed as we move ahead with the assessment of existing and proposed policy instruments for biodiversity conservation in the case studies (WP7) and the multi-scale comparative case study analysis and transferability assessment of economic instruments (WP8).