Decision Support Tool to assist the identification of Economic Instruments
There is a need of identifying economic instruments for the implementation of Integrated Natural Resrouces Management (INRM) that can create meaningful incentives for target interventions and strategies identified in the frame of AfroMaison. A review of economic instruments that are or have been applied internationally to offer incentives for improving integrated natural resource management has hence been performed and these have been clustered into three groups:
- Price based instruments (7 instruments)
- Rights based instruments (2 instruments)
- Legal, voluntary and information based instruments (5 instruments)
A Decision Support Tool has been developed to assist resource managers or implementing agents to ‘walk’ through the set of selection criteria (economic, social, governance and environment) that will help to evaluate alignment of economic instruments with a the target context. The Decision Support Tool assists the process of context-instrument matching with the aim of highlighting the economic instruments that have the greatest potential to create meaningful incentives to change the behaviour of people to improve the way they use and manage environment in a specific contexts.
The Decision Support Tool was initially developed as an Excel matrix, and subsequently converted into an html / javascript application that can be run in any web browser, online or offline (once downloaded). The user has to determine if a criteria is relevant to the context for which the instruments are being assessed; if yes, select the ‘Yes’ button, if not select ‘No’ (see Figure below). The relevant points are automatically allocated based on the selection made for each of the criteria across the four categories.
Once all the criteria have been rated, the score can be calculated for all the instruments for the given context by clicking on the ‘Calculate Score’ button. The results are illustrated in text, as well as graphically per category (Environmental, Social, Market, and Governance) as illustrated below:
It is also simultanously calculated for an overall score across all four categories (by expanding the summary scores section), which provides the opportunity to weight one or more of the categories more heavily than the others if needed:
Please click here to access the decision support tool.
