Economic incentives for the regulation of the provision of bundles of ecosystem services in agroecosystems

Agroecosystems show a decline in regulating, non-marketed ecosystem services (ES). We interpret this decline through two economic concepts: public goods, which call for regulation, and joint production, which underlines the role of interactions among ecosystem services in their regulation.This thesis studies how to increase the provision of non-marketed ES through the implementation of economic incentives, while accounting for their multiplicity and the complex interactions among them.We first study the regulation of joint public goods with microeconomic theory. We then carry an applied analysis with simulated agroecological data and numerical methods to define cost-efficient solutions and simulate the implementation these solutions with economic incentives. We especially compare result-based and action-based incentives.We show theoretically that interactions among ES make their regulation more complex, especially with result-based incentives and when the production cost varies among bundles of ES. In the applied analysis, we show that accounting for the cost is crucial to maximise ES with a limited budget. We show that result-based incentives select cost-efficient bundles of ES but lead to higher policy budgets than action-based ones, due to interactions among ES. Eventually, we show that considering the landscape scale and heterogeneity plays on the solutions maximising ES, but not on the comparison between result-based and action-based incentives.Our results underline that agri-environmental policies need to target ES in a integrative way, at the farm or landscape scale, and consider the cost of providing non-marketed ES. Result-based incentives don’t solve all issues of agri-environmental policies.