Farmers’ Willingness to Participate in Payment‐for‐Environmental‐Services Programmes

Abstract

Understanding farmers' willingness to participate in agricultural payment-for-environmental-services (PES) programmes is an essential precondition for designing effective and efficient programmes. Willingness to participate is typically examined via stated preference surveys using the standard hurdle model for whether and how much to participate. Among respondents who decline to participate, such analyses cannot distinguish between respondents who declined due to the payment level and those who were not interested at all. This paper applies a double hurdle model to incorporate a prior condition for whether a respondent is even willing to consider participating in the PES market. The model uses a unique stated preference survey permitting separation of the consideration and enrolment decisions of 1,700 farmers in Michigan, USA. The first hurdle probit model suggests that farmers' willingness to consider PES chiefly depends on farm and farmer characteristics, while the second hurdle tobit model shows that decisions on whether and how much to enrol depend more on the payment offer and marginal benefit-cost criteria. This study provides fresh insights on facilitating farmer participation in PES programmes using tiered strategies that differ in costs of programme payment and administration.

Factors Influencing Farmers’ Willingness to Participate in Wetland Restoration: Evidence from China

“…There is a rich literature that describes individual participation decisions in environmental programs [8,[11][12][13][14]. In this review, we focus on empirical studies analyzing participation incentives and identifying factors affecting wetland restoration program participation (see Table 1 for more details).…”

Investigating fishers’ preferences for the design of marine Payments for Environmental Services schemes

“…Zilberman et al, 2008). More recently, the literature has looked towards addressing the need to understand potential providers' willingness to participate in PES (Newton et al, 2012;Gong et al, 2010;Ma et al, 2010;Petheram & Campbell 2010;Zbinden & Lee 2005). However, these studies have mostly concentrated on describing endogenous individual and household determinants influencing adoption or non-adoption of PES schemes by service providers.…”

How Willing Are Herders to Participate in Carbon Sequestration and Mitigation? An Inner Mongolian Grassland Case

“…As the essential economic activity subjects and the most basic decision-making units in pastoral areas, herders have become the most important and direct influencing factors for ecological environment Sustainability 2018, 10, 2808 8 of 10 changes in pastoral areas by utilizing grassland resources and economic management behaviors. Moreover, their cognitive level on grassland carbon sequestration and mitigation would influence the promotion and implementation of the corresponding measures there, as well as the subsequent sustainable development [8,14,27]. However, this study shows the herders' cognitive level, and the protection effect of carbon sequestration mitigation on grassland has no significant influence on herders' willingness to participate.…”

“…Internal influencing factors referred to individual characteristics of the participants, such as the age of family members, their education degree, their knowledge and experience about carbon sequestration and mitigation, the number of labor force, and the financial income of the family [14,18,19]. For example, higher participation willingness was found in families with generally younger members than those with aging members, and in families with high financial income than those with poor financial income [20][21][22].…”

“…As a relatively independent management unit, family pastures have independent decision-making power to grassland management. Therefore, in-depth understanding of cognition, participation willingness, and decision processes of herders on carbon sequestration and mitigation would be directly related to the implementation and popularization of carbon sequestration and mitigation measures in grassland areas, which would play an important role in realizing sustainable development of the area [14].…”