This paper aims to clarify two distinct but complementary questions on economic and legal additionality in the payments for environmental services (PES) debate based on examples from the literature and direct observations made in Madagascar and Mexico. For the economic dimension of additionality, we explain two ‘regimes of justification’, efficiency on the one hand and social equity on the other, and discuss how analysts position themselves with regard to both regimes. For the legal dimension, we review and analyse specific cases in which PES are implemented in addition to existing environmental regulations. We propose a renewed framework of analysis to distinguish ‘compensation’ and ‘reward’ in PES by crossing the opportunity cost dimension and the legal constraint vis‐à‐vis the environment. We show how difficult it is to fully maintain the objective of efficiency when PES are implemented simultaneously across different combinations of opportunity costs and regulation constraints. We propose policy options to address the contradiction between incentive and coercive instruments. These options are land sparing, social targeting and chronological combinations. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Achieving forest conservation together with poverty alleviation and equity is an unending challenge in the tropics. The Makira REDD+ pilot project located in northeastern Madagascar is a well-suited case to explore this challenge in conditions of extreme poverty and climatic vulnerability. We assessed the potential effect of project siting on the livelihoods of the local population and which households would be the most strongly impacted by conservation measures. Farmers living in hilly areas must resort to slash-and-burn agriculture (tavy) since a combination of topographic and climatic constraints, such as cyclones, makes permanent rice cultivation very difficult. These are the people who suffer most from conservation-related restriction measures. For practical reasons the project, unfortunately, did not target these farmers. The main focus was on communities with a lower cyclonic risk that are able to practice permanent rice agriculture in the lowlands. To reduce deforestation without violating the principles of equity, REDD+ projects in Madagascar need to better target populations facing high climatic risks and invest in efforts to improve the farmers' agricultural systems.

Transitioning agri-food systems towards increased sustainability and resilience requires that attention be paid to sustainable food consumption policies. Policy-making processes often require the engagement and acceptance of key stakeholders. This study analyses stakeholders’ solutions for creating sustainable agri-food systems, through interviews with a broad range of stakeholders including food value chain actors, non-governmental organizations, governmental institutions, research institutions and academic experts. The study draws on 38 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in four European countries: France, Iceland, Italy and the UK, as well as three interviews with high-level EU experts. The interviewees’ solutions were analysed according to a five-category typology of policy tools, encompassing direct activity regulations, and market-based, knowledge-based, governance and strategic policy tools. Most of the identified solutions were located in the strategic tools category, reflecting shared recognition of the need to integrate food policy to achieve long-term goals. Emerging solutions—those which were most commonly identified among the different national contexts—were then used to derive empirically-grounded and more universally applicable recommendations for the advancement of sustainable food consumption policies.