Targeting Conservation Investments in Heterogeneous Landscapes: A distance function approach and application to watershed management

To achieve a given level of an environmental amenity at least cost, decision-makers must integrate information about spatially variable biophysical and economic conditions. Although the biophysical attributes that contribute to supplying an environmental amenity are often known, the way in which these attributes interact to produce the amenity is often unknown. Given the difficulty in converting multiple attributes into a unidimensional physical measure of an environmental amenity (e.g., habitat quality), analyses in the academic literature tend to use a single biophysical attribute as a proxy for the environmental amenity (e.g., species richness). A narrow focus on a single attribute, however, fails to consider the full range of biophysical attributes that are critical to the supply of an environmental amenity. Drawing on the production efficiency literature, we introduce an alternative conservation targeting approach that relies on distance functions to cost-efficiently allocate conservation funds across a spatially heterogeneous landscape. An approach based on distance functions has the advantage of not requiring a parametric specification of the amenity function (or cost function), but rather only requiring that the decision-maker identify important biophysical and economic attributes. We apply the distance-function approach empirically to an increasingly common, but little studied, conservation initiative: conservation contracting for water quality objectives. The contract portfolios derived from the distance-function application have many desirable properties, including intuitive appeal, robust performance across plausible parametric amenity measures, and the generation of ranking measures that can be easily used by field practitioners in complex decision-making environments that cannot be completely modeled. Working Paper # 2002-01

In the autumn of their lives: exploring the geographies and rhythms of old[er] age masculinities

Using a novel longitudinal qualitative approach of revisiting older men across an elongated period, this paper addresses the lack of geographical attention given to older age masculinities specifically, and the limited exploration of the temporal aspects of masculinity more generally. Situated within debates around intersectional and relational approaches to masculinity and the critical geographies of ageing, the paper utilises insights from Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis to examine how older men (re)produce, organise, and improvise rhythms in using and experiencing places as they age. The paper shows how the notion of masculinities as relational is given fresh insight when considered through the lens of rhythms, offering a less dualistic framing of men than those centred on bodily capacity and that automatically present older men as subordinate, redundant, or inferior. The paper draws on in‐depth, repeat, qualitative interviews across four phases in an 18‐year period with 32 older men (over 65) in the UK. The analysis points to how changing rhythms as men age may be accommodated through, and subsumed within, wider rhythms of continued work, periods of busyness, and eurhythmia (accordance of rhythms) with those around them. Conversely, aspects of arrhythmia (dissonance or conflict of rhythms) that have previously been pointed to as marginalising may also offer older men a level of distinction – allowing, for example, a distancing from age‐graded spaces and prevalent discourses of older age as well as enabling socially dominant masculine positions compared to others at the local level. The paper also points to how masculinities are not only relational to other people and places but also to natural and non‐human rhythms and daily and seasonal contingencies as well as across time