The role of open data in fighting land corruption: evidence, opportunities and challenges

The rapid progress in digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) comes with both fresh opportunities and new challenges. Since the mid-2000s, the global land governance community has piloted a series of open data and transparency initiatives largely based on such digital innovations, aiming at increasing accountability and counteracting corruption in the land sector, both at the local and global level. By combining a desk-based review of the existing literature and data with a series of semi-structured interviews with a panel of sectoral experts, this study takes stock of more than a decade of interventions pioneering the use of open data to curb land corruption, and explores their impact, their achievements, the existing barriers and limitations, as well as potential ways to overcome them. While open data and transparency initiatives tackling land corruption – which is one of the key issues undermining the achievement of sustainable land governance – are reaching their maturity, their success and their ability to secure funding and investments in the near future still hangs in the balance, as it relies on the capacity to demonstrate, measure and track impact on the ground. This publication was commissioned and funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH – Anti-Corruption and Integrity Programme, on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development(BMZ). This study, awarded to the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development – University of Reading through a competitive tender process, was conducted by Dr Marcello De Maria and Niko Howa

Global soybean trade - the geopolitics of a bean

Following a collaborative effort and with the support of The UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI GCRF), the Trade, Development and the Environment Hub -- or simply Trade Hub, https://tradehub.earth/ -- has recently launched the report “Global Soybean Trade – The Geopolitics of a Bean”. Originally cultivated as a traditional staple food in China, soybean today is of the most important global commodities in international trade. The report examines the economics of the ‘soybean miracle’, exploring its complex – and often controversial – implications for people and ecosystems, and analysing how different institutions and stakeholders are addressing the growing sustainability concerns. This publication not only provide a comprehensive review of the existing publications and data, but also highlights some of the open questions that need to be addressed by Trade Hub partners and other stakeholders in order to increase the sustainability of the soybean supply chain, both globally and locally

Mangrove ecosystem services discrete choice experiment in Tobago

Mangrove provide many benefits to society through various goods and services such as coastal protection, water flow regulation, carbon sequestration and recreation. However, the coastal zone is an area that is subject to multiple development scenarios in a limited land space. Given the issues surrounding the trade-offs between economic development and mangrove conservation where there is considerable land use challenges due to coastal development it seems timely to explore the preferences of local residents in particular for mangrove ecosystem services over economic development and vice versa, using the island of Tobago as a case study. We achieve this in a few ways, by applying methodological treatments to a discrete choice experiment. This was undertaken by 1) estimating the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of Tobagonian households for a mangrove conservation programme; 2) use various methodological treatments in payment horizons and individual characteristics to determine if length of payments, uncertainty and socio-demographic characteristics influence respondent preferences in the case; 3) conduct follow-up surveys to explore effects on WTP of the attributes and respondents’ thinking; 4) consider potential implications of our findings on mangrove conservation policy. The data shows the code, the derived model output and the dataset for all Hierarchical Bayesian models analysed with Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo Markov Chains in Stan and could be used in either PyStan or RStan. Stan is an open-source software available from https://mc-stan.org/. Details can be found in the documentation from https://mc-stan.org/users/documentation/. The output is expressed in willingness-to-pay Space in Trinidad and Tobago Dollars (TT) and are directly interpretable in monetary values from the mean, median, standard deviation and confidence intervals. The data was gathered from a questionnaire using convenience sampling targeted key decision makers' of households on their preferences for mangrove ecosystem services at the Bon Accord/Buccoo Bay site. Study participants (n = 292) were given 12 choice tasks (6 at 5 year payment horizon and 6 at 25 year payment horizon) and asked to choose one option amongst 3 alternatives (status quo, option A and option B) with the 7 attributes: fisheries; coastal erosion; flood frequency; mangrove cover; number of species; tourism revenue; and price. The data is interpreted as the WTP for an increase to mangrove ES for instance, using the merged model- with certainty scaling there is a mean WTP by respondents of approximately $29 TT in tax annually to avoid 4 floods. Notable findings include a high WTP to avoid 50$102 TT per year and a WTP of $30 TT to avoid a 30% decrease in tourism revenue. The data is used to give monetary values to non-market goods expressing the trade-offs across ecosystem services which can have policy implications