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In 2010 Laurence Smith concluded three years of research funded by the Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) Programme, which is a collaboration between the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The project developed guidance on improving water quality in catchments and identified the governance arrangements that would be necessary to achieve this. The research involved comparison of catchment governance systems and institutional arrangements drawn from examples in the USA, UK and North West Europe. Two catchments in the UK were also selected for study and piloting of approaches - the River Tamar in southwest England and the River Thurne in Norfolk.
Work on catchment management continues in 2011 and 2012. A new project funded by RELU will investigate ‘Payments for Ecosystems Services’ (PES) schemes. These involve a voluntary transaction in which a land use providing an environmental service is paid for by one or more beneficiaries. The project will partner and evaluate the Westcountry Rivers Trust’s WATER project in South West England, which aims to develop a market-based catchment restoration scheme.
Nigel Poole in February visited three of our PhD students conducting fieldwork and writing up in Bolivia. He also furthered collaborative research initiatives with the CGIAR organisation Centro Internacional de la Papa based in Lima, Peru. He continues work on a Ford Foundation-sponsored review of Global Rural Community Enterprises with CATIE based in Costa Rica.
Colin Poulton has been spending time working in Tanzania and Zimbabwe as part of a nine-country comparative study of African cotton industries that is being organised by the World Bank.
Andrew Dorward, Colin Poulton and Jonathan Kydd are involved in a major evaluation of the 2006/7 Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme in Malawi for the Malawi Government, working with staff from the University of Malawi, Overseas Development Institute and Michigan State University. This work is being funded by DFID Malawi and by the Future Agricultures Consortium, a partnership between research-based organisations in Africa and the UK aiming to elaborate the practical and policy challenges of establishing and sustaining pro-poor agricultural growth in Africa.
The World Bank's 2008 World Development Report will be on agriculture. Peter Hazell is responsible for writing a chapter on Natural Resource Management, with inputs from Laurence Smith and Nigel Poole. Colin Poulton, Andrew Dorward, and Jonathan Kydd have contributed two background papers for the chapter on markets.
