o-production is a rapidly growing endeavour now widely applied in the fields of health, development, education, climate change, industrial production and sustainability [1][2][3][4][5][6] . It broadly seeks to connect researchers with diverse societal actors to collaboratively and iteratively produce knowledge, action and societal change 1 . The promise is compelling: developing solutions through legitimate processes that draw on diverse and credible expertise with, by and for those best placed to use them 5,7,8 . Sustainability

Policy relevance Policy makers, researchers and analysts helping to plan and implement REDD+, environmental services and climate change would find this paper potentially helpful. The paper explores progress on REDD+ Readiness across four countries (Cameroon, Indonesia, Peru and Vietnam) and provides broad lessons, recommendations and examples across these countries for further improving REDD+. The paper also suggests an innovative, credible and universally applicable set of criteria and indicators derived through a systematic review that could serve further global comparative analysis of readiness for REDD+ and relevant national environmental services delivery systems, including climate change mitigation.

To supply ecosystem services, private landholders incur costs. Knowledge of these costs is critical for the design of conservation-payment programs. Estimating these costs accurately is difficult because the minimum acceptable payment to a potential supplier is private information. We describe how an auction of payment contracts can be designed to elicit this information during the design phase of a conservation-payment program. With an estimate of the ecosystem-service supply curve from a pilot auction, conservation planners can explore the financial, ecological, and socioeconomic consequences of alternative scaled-up programs. We demonstrate the potential of our approach in Indonesia, where soil erosion on coffee farms generates downstream ecological and economic costs. Bid data from a small-scale, uniform-price auction for soil-conservation contracts allowed estimates of the costs of a scaled-up program, the gain from integrating biophysical and economic data to target contracts, and the trade-offs between poverty alleviation and supply of ecosystem services. Our study illustrates an auction-based approach to revealing private information about the costs of supplying ecosystem services. Such information can improve the design of programs devised to protect and enhance ecosystem services.

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