Agricultural Groundwater Protection through Groundwater Co-operations in Lower Saxony, Germany, – a multi stakeholder task

Despite the fact that German agriculture is embedded in an intricate structure of regulative law for the protection of the environment, in the 1980s, groundwater in some areas still contained high nitrate concentrations and revealed a lack of law enforcement. This especially held true for a federal state like Lower Saxony where more than two third of agricultural value added comes from animal production, and liquid manure application on the field is a considerable source for groundwater pollution. As a response and supplementary to regulative law, the “Co-operation Decree” (“Kooperationserlass”) as a basis for the so-called “Lower Saxon Co-operation Model” was issued. Its objective was to initiate the formation of locally adapted and goal orientated initiatives (socalled “groundwater co-operations”) among farmers, water suppliers and local administrations in order to find solutions which satisfy both, the protection of groundwater, as well as the profitability of agriculture. Since traditional forms of professional organisation in agricultural and environmental protection interest groups were transcended, stakeholders had to negotiate “face-to-face” and, for the case of farmers, had to find new forms of organisation within these groundwater co-operations. Furthermore, a sound moderation in the beginning of the co-operations' work was necessary. This brought private entities, engineering consultancies, in who, based on their technical expertise, at first mediated among conflicting parties, to then facilitate the joint development of groundwater protecting measures to be realised by farmers. The Co-operation Model's “water extraction fee” further guarantees financial compensation of farmers in cases of yield losses caused by measure implementation. After an at times difficult start, work in groundwater co-operations up until now shows that through opening up and cooperating with other stakeholders, agriculture can considerably develop and improve itself, and at the same time respond to emerging new societal demands. A case will exemplify that farmers made use of the co-operation in the course of time and extended it to other areas of their concern in order to improve their agricultural business. Furthermore, according to the so-called “Lower Saxon Co-operation Model”, agriculture is not just a producer of a maximum of yield. The protection of drinking water resources is seen as a further societal interest which can be realised through groundwater protecting measures developed in local co-operations. This approach was further developed with the granting of the project H2Ö. Here, a change to groundwater protecting agriculture is not “compensated” through subsidies, but H2Ö tries to integrate organic agriculture, as one form of groundwater protecting agriculture, in a market structure, as well as it tries to support the development of this structure. At the same time, with a reform of the Co-operation Model, the financial autonomy of groundwater co-operations and their responsibility for the realisation of measures will increase. It remains to be seen how this new responsibility of cooperations may reinforce identification and creativity on the part of farmers to further develop groundwater protecting agriculture

Synopsis of the Special Issue Section: “The social organization of agricultural biogas production and use”

No abstract available

Implementação do mecanismo de desenvolvimento limpo (MDL) na China : uma análise institucional = Clean development mechanism implementation and additionality in China: an institutional analysis

No abstract available

Controlling groundwater through smart card machines: the case of water quotas and pricing mechanisms in Gansu Province, China

The second issue of the GRIPP Case Profile Series documents the use of water quotas and pricing mechanisms in Northwest China to control and manage groundwater. Since the 1970s, this region has experienced intensive groundwater abstraction by smallholder farmers. In 2002, however, the revised Water Law urged local authorities to regulate groundwater use in regions with overdraft. The Case Profile reviews, in detail, the use of smart card machines installed on wells by the local government to control abstraction. The study compares the situation in two counties where local authorities opted for two different types of regulatory mechanisms enabled by the smart cards: Minqin County - where they chose quotas, and Guazhou County - where they opted for a tiered water pricing system.This Case Profile highlights how the success of smart card machines depends on the design and implementation of the regulatory mechanism behind the machines. In Minqin, quotas have successfully affected farmer's groundwater use practices, whereas in Guazhou, water pricing has had little impact on farmer's individual groundwater use practices. Moreover, the case of Minqin exemplifies that quotas enable equitable water access to all farmers and maintain the buffer function of conjunctive surface water and groundwater use. These are important principles to design effective groundwater regulation policies, both in and outside China

Controlling groundwater through smart card machines : The case of water quotas and pricing mechanisms in Gansu Province, China.

Since the 1970s, intensive groundwater abstraction by smallholder farmers has led to falling groundwater levels and related problems in many parts of North China. The 2002 revised Water Law urges local authorities to regulate groundwater use in regions of overdraft. This GRIPP Case Profile documents two cases of local groundwater abstraction regulation in Gansu Province, Northwest China, based on primary data collection. In both cases, smart card machines were installed on farmers’ wells to control groundwater abstraction. However, in the case of Minqin County, the local authorities opted for quotas, while in the case of Guazhou County, they opted for tiered water pricing as a regulation instrument. The quotas in Minqin have been implemented in a way that directly affected farmers’ groundwater use practices. Consequently, farmers are no longer free to decide when and how much groundwater to use. The tiered water pricing in Guazhou has had little implications for farmers’ individual groundwater use practices. The pricing threshold is flattened out at farm group level and the price is not raised to a level which instills behavioral change. Hence, it can be concluded that the potential of smart card machines to control groundwater abstraction is highly dependent on the design and implementation of the regulatory mechanism behind the machines. Although the present study cannot draw hard conclusions on the effectiveness of quotas and pricing mechanisms per se, it does provide an indication that, in the given societal context, the practicability of quotas to reduce farmers’ groundwater abstraction is higher than that of tiered pricing. Notably, the case of Minqin exemplifies that quotas lend themselves well to ensure equitable water access to all farmers and maintain the buffer function of conjunctive surface water and groundwater use. These are important principles to design effective groundwater regulation policies, both in and outside China

An institutional approach to manure recycling : Conduit brokerage in Sichuan Province, China

With increases in living standards and dietary changes, the livestock sector has grown rapidly worldwide, which has led to considerable environmental pollution through livestock manure. Particularly in East Asia, meat production has increased fast. While part of the problem can be resolved by further processing manure into commercial organic fertilizer, technological solutions do face their limits in dealing with high pollution loads at farms. There is hence urgent need for policy instruments that could help mitigate environmental pollution. However, not much is known about related policy initiatives. This paper introduces a cooperative in Sichuan Province, China, which connects livestock farms to crop farms that are willing to use livestock breeders’ manure on their land. As no frameworks exist which could aid the analysis of such a cooperative, we develop a framework based on the concept of “brokerage”. Our analysis shows that for the case of Qionglai, structural conditions are favourable to the cooperative closing the nutrient cycle by means of brokerage. However, as our analysis shows, constraints to the cooperative’s effectiveness foremost come from its daily operations. Within the given institutional structure, further qualitative improvements should be undertaken in terms of manure processing and manure management. The application of the framework to manure recycling shows that the framework and brokerage in general are useful analytical concepts for the circular economy. We conclude that the framework could also be applied to other fields of the circular economy, like food waste or bioenergy

Representing Indigenous Sacred Land: The Case of the Niyamgiri Movement in India

This paper analyses the representations of the religiosity of the indigenous Dongaria Kondh community in India by international and domestic activists. The Dongaria Kondhs live on and worship the Niyamgiri Mountain on top of which a bauxite mining project was planned. The community’s religiosity became the primary focus of what became known as the Niyamgiri Movement. Activists at local and international scales employed different representations of the Dongaria Kondhs’ religious relation with their land, which facilitated different groups’ identification with the Dongarias’ religiosity, and consequently enhanced the support for the Niyamgiri Movement, which was ultimately successful. The paper uses Spivak’s theorisation of subalternity and Baudrillard’s theory of enchanted simulacra to conduct its analysis. It finds that the representational strategies of the Niyamgiri Movement created space for the Dongarias to voice themselves—in opposition to oppressive power structures and beyond the strategic narratives delineated by the activists who represented them

Overcoming the “club dilemma” of village-scale bioenergy projects—The case of India

Small scale, decentralised electricity generation at village level, based on locally available biomass, is a promising solution for providing electricity access in remote rural areas, as it can supply villages with an independent, reliable, high quality and environmentally friendly energy source. However, despite such systems' technological feasibility, they are often discontinued. Research so far has not studied the reasons for discontinuation. This article analyses a case of biomass based gasification in India, by studying the type of goods the village system provides, and the distribution of benefits within the system. In this case, the infrastructural and social system provide electricity as a “club good”. Given fluctuating numbers of service users, the club faced the decision to either expand the system to new members, or to reduce the services provided. The focus on the village community hampered the extension of “the club”. A reduction in the quality and quantity of services however decreased the comfort provided by the system. The system faced what here is called a “club dilemma”. To avoid the “club dilemma” and for a sustained energy provision, policy needs to find means to secure feedstock, i.e. by the means of subsidies or collaboration with agricultural departments