Measuring impacts of conservation interventions on human well-being and the environment in Northern Cambodia

Abstract

About 3ie The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) promotes evidence-informed, equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. We support the generation and effective use of high-quality evidence to inform decision-making and improve the lives of people living in poverty in low-and middle-income countries. We provide guidance and support to produce, synthesise and quality assure evidence of what works, for whom, how, why and at what cost. 3ie impact evaluations 3ie-supported impact evaluations assess the difference a development intervention has made to social and economic outcomes. 3ie is committed to funding rigorous evaluations that include a theory-based design and that use the most appropriate mix of methods to capture outcomes and are useful in complex development contexts. About this report 3ie accepted the final version of the report, Rebuilding the social compact: urban service delivery and property taxes in Pakistan, as partial fulfilment of requirements under grant DPW1.1005 awarded through Development Priorities Window 1. The report is technically sound and 3ie is making it available to the public in this final report version as it was received. No further work has been done. The 3ie technical quality assurance team for this report comprises Francis Rathinam, Neeta Goel, Kanika Jha Kingra and Deeksha Ahuja, an anonymous external impact evaluation design expert reviewer and an anonymous external sector expert reviewer, with overall technical supervision by Marie Gaarder. The 3ie editorial production team for this report comprises Anushruti Ganguly and Akarsh Gupta.

Effects of social networks on interventions to change conservation behavior

“…This could involve working with highly connected opinion leaders (Valente & Pumpuang, 2007), small groups of socially close individuals (Centola, 2018), or even forming new ties between receptive individuals (Contractor & DeChurch, 2014). In Cambodia, antipoisoning interventions could be integrated with broader social interventions, such as the Ibis Rice conservation agriculture program, that aim to influence agricultural and conservation decision‐making (Clements et al., 2020). Furthermore, such strategies may alter the structures of social networks in the long term, potentially producing more enabling social contexts (de Lange et al., 2019).…”

Towards equity in land protection

“…Lan (2015, 2018) found positive impacts of China's Sloping Land Conversion program on household diversification of livelihoods as well as productivity. Adjognon et al (2021) found that a PES program in Burkina Faso that compensated households for maintenance of newly planted trees clearly improved food security; Clements et al (2020) also found that some types of PES in Cambodia likely improved food security. At the same time, the hope that PES would lead to very strong gains for local livelihoods often has not materialized.…”

Delivering behavioural change at scale: What conservation can learn from other fields

“…Despite the widespread use of randomisation in other fields and promising signs of wider use in conservation (e.g. Jayachandran et al 2017;Pynegar et al 2018;Wilebore et al 2019;Clements et al 2020), the practice remains in its infancy within conservation. This is partly due to concerns raised about the extent of their applicability in conservation.…”

“…Interventions that naturally operate on iterative cycles, such as agricultural incentive schemes, are particularly suited to such an approach. This has been the case for the Ibis Rice programme implemented by the Wildlife Conservation Society in northern Cambodia, which has iteratively improved the design of the programme over a ten-year period (Clements et al 2020).…”