Rewarding the Delivery of Public Goods: How to Achieve this in Practice – Land Use Conference

Scotland’s Biennial Land Use and Environment Conference XII was hosted at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh from the 28th – 29th November 2018, entitled Rewarding the Delivery of Public Goods: How to Achieve this in Practice. The conference sought to help inform and shape the debate about how best to reward farmers, foresters and other land managers for delivering public goods from their land management practices. It provided a forum to help thinking of practical implementation, and what that meant for policy development, particularly post-brexit.

Professor Davy McCracken, the chair of the organising committee of the Land Use Conference, gave a short interview of the Conference Rationale.

The main programme featured a total of twenty presentations across four major themes.  For more information on the speakers, alongside the presentations, please follow the links below.

• Theme 1: What type of environmental public goods should be prioritised for delivery by and managers in the future?
• Theme 2: How can land managers be encouraged and helped to deliver those public goods effectively?
• Theme 3: What mechanisms are available for rewarding land managers for the provision of public goods?
• Panel Debate: What changes in policy or governance are required to reward land managers for the delivery of environmental public goods in a cost-effective and transparent way

After the conference,Bill McKelvey, past principal of SRUC and member of the SEPA board,  gave a short conference overview of some of the topics covered.

During the conference, interviews from speakers and attendees were conducted, providing thoughts on the conference content from a wide range of organisations a perspectives. These included David Baldock from the Institute for European Environmental Policy on doing things differently, Francesca Osowska from Scottish Natural Heritage  on how we support the delivery of public goods, and Professor Ian Hodge from the University of Cambridge on the procurement model, to name a few. The complete playlist of short interviews can be viewed below.