In-kind conservation payments crowd in environmental values and increase support for government intervention: A randomized trial in Bolivia

Grillos, Tara; Bottazzi, Patrick; Crespo, David; Asquith, Nigel; Jones, Julia P. G.

doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106404

Cited by 43 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…Future research should examine how these findings play out in other geographical and cultural contexts. For example, the implementation of an incentive-based program in Bolivia actually increased concerns for accountability as a fairness principle (71). The social expectation to be treated fairly is higher in Vietnam than in most other countries, according to World Values Survey data (SI Appendix, section 2.7), and motivational consequences of (un)fairness could be moderated by such cultural beliefs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

Loft

Gehrig²,

Salk

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Global efforts for biodiversity protection and land use-based greenhouse gas mitigation call for increases in the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental conservation. Incentive-based policy instruments are key tools for meeting these goals, yet their effectiveness might be undermined by such factors as social norms regarding whether payments are considered fair. We investigated the causal link between equity and conservation effort with a randomized real-effort experiment in forest conservation with 443 land users near a tropical forest national park in the Vietnamese Central Annamites, a global biodiversity hotspot. The experiment introduced unjustified payment inequality based on luck, in contradiction of local fairness norms that were measured through responses to vignettes. Payment inequality was perceived as less fair than payment equality. In agreement with our preregistered hypotheses, participants who were disadvantaged by unequal payments exerted significantly less conservation effort than other participants receiving the same payment under an equal distribution. No effect was observed for participants advantaged by inequality. Thus, equity effects on effort can have consequences for the effectiveness and efficiency of incentive-based conservation instruments. Furthermore, we show that women exerted substantially more conservation effort than men, and that increasing payment size unexpectedly reduced effort. This emphasizes the need to consider social comparisons, local equity norms, and gender in environmental policies using monetary incentives to motivate behavioral change.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

Loft

Gehrig²,

Salk

et al. 2020

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…These three things will require policy support from the government in terms of decision making oriented to the principle of conservation of natural resources. Conservation programs have a positive impact on environmental values and the involvement of government roles [114]. Conservation of renewable natural resources and promotion of economic growth are both sustainable development goals [115].…”

Section: Sustainable Development Of the Mamminasata Metropolitan Subumentioning

confidence: 99%

Land Use Change, Spatial Interaction, and Sustainable Development in the Metropolitan Urban Areas, South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia

Surya

Ahmad

Sakti

et al. 2020

Land

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Metropolitan Urban Mamminasata South Sulawesi, Indonesia as the object of study is explored in the core-peripheral spatial interaction towards the formation of suburban service centers. The problems raised in this study are (i) is there a relationship/correlation between spatial integration, spatial interaction, and urban agglomeration to the formation of urban activity systems and (ii) how the formation of urban activity systems works as a determinant of economic growth, land use change and environmental quality degradation towards sustainable development in the metropolitan city of Mamminasata. Comparative studies of suburban areas have been carried out over three time periods (2001, 2015 and 2019). Data elaboration on observations, surveys and documentation is done to describe urban dynamics in terms of economic, social and environmental aspects. Path analysis is used to address direct effects, indirect effects, differences, and dependencies between urban elements. The gravity model is used to analyze the spatial interactions of the core city with the periphery. The study results show that spatial integration, spatial interaction and urban agglomeration have a positive effect on the system of urban activity and economic growth in the outskirts of the Mamminasata Metropolitan area. The results of this study recommend policy makers and urban planners that land use change, spatial integration and urban spatial interactions on the spatial scale of metropolitan cities to require the implementation of sustainable development concepts oriented towards saving the environment, ensuring fairness in economic access and creating social cohesion, in line with meeting national Metropolitan city development targets by 2030.

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“…2019), and environmental values (Grillos et al. 2019). A third landscape‐scale RCT in conservation explored the impact of unconditional livelihood payments on deforestation rates in Sierra Leone (Wilebore et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Jayachandran et al (2017) showed that carbon payments slowed deforestation rates in Uganda. The RCT in Bolivia of the Watershared intervention (Bottazzi et al 2018) has been used to evaluate the impact of incentivizing farmers to keep cattle out of riparian forest and reduce deforestation on water quality (Pynegar et al 2018), deforestation rates (Wiik et al 2019), and environmental values (Grillos et al 2019). A third landscape-scale RCT in conservation explored the impact of unconditional livelihood payments on deforestation rates in Sierra Leone (Wilebore et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanisms and impacts of an incentive‐based conservation program with evidence from a randomized control trial

Wiik

Jones

Pynegar

et al. 2020

Conservation Biology

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Conservation science needs more high-quality impact evaluations, especially ones that explore mechanisms of success or failure. Randomized control trials (RCTs) provide particularly robust evidence of the effectiveness of interventions (although they have been criticized as reductionist and unable to provide insights into mechanisms), but there have been few such experiments investigating conservation at the landscape scale. We explored the impact of Watershared, an incentive-based conservation program in the Bolivian Andes, with one of the few RCTs of landscape-scale conservation in existence. There is strong interest in such incentive-based conservation approaches as some argue they can avoid negative social impacts sometimes associated with protected areas. We focused on social and environmental outcomes based on responses from a household survey in 129 communities randomly allocated to control or treatment (conducted both at the baseline in 2010 and repeated in 2015-2016). We controlled for incomplete program uptake by combining standard RCT analysis with matching methods and investigated mechanisms by exploring intermediate and ultimate outcomes according to the underlying theory of change. Previous analyses, focused on single biophysical outcomes, showed that over its first 5 years Watershared did not slow deforestation or improve water quality at the landscape scale. We found that Watershared influenced some outcomes measured using the survey, but the effects were complex, and some were unexpected. We thus demonstrated how RCTs can provide insights into the pathways of impact, as well as whether an intervention has impact. This paper, one of the first registered reports in conservation science, demonstrates how preregistration can help make complex research designs more transparent, avoid cherry picking, and reduce publication bias.

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In-kind conservation payments crowd in environmental values and increase support for government intervention: A randomized trial in Bolivia

Abstract: In-kind conservation payments crowd in environmental values and increase support for government intervention: A randomized trial in Bolivia

Cited by 43 publications

References 90 publications

Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

Land Use Change, Spatial Interaction, and Sustainable Development in the Metropolitan Urban Areas, South Sulawesi Province, Indonesia

Mechanisms and impacts of an incentive‐based conservation program with evidence from a randomized control trial

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