Incentivizing Conservation of de facto Community-Owned Forests
Payments for environmental services are a nature conservation policy in which landowners receive financial compensation conditional on verified environmental service delivery. Contracts for payments for environmental services have been found to be...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/216171623174715621/Incentivizing-Conservation-of-de-facto-Community-Owned-Forests http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35730 |
| Summary: | Payments for environmental services are
a nature conservation policy in which landowners receive
financial compensation conditional on verified environmental
service delivery. Contracts for payments for environmental
services have been found to be effective in inducing
conservation on private lands, but they may give rise to
strong free-riding incentives when implemented on lands that
are, de facto or de jure, commonly owned. This study
implemented a randomized controlled trial in arid Burkina
Faso to test the relative effectiveness of two collective
payment for environmental services schemes in inducing
forest conservation—a linear group payment scheme, in which
group payments increase linearly with tree survival rates,
and a threshold group payment scheme. The extant theory
predicts that the latter incentive mechanism will (weakly)
outperform the former. This paper develops a new theory that
shows that the reverse may also hold—but only if the
relationship between effort and tree survival rates is very
uncertain. The findings show that threshold group payments
increase intermediate measures of cooperation,
but—consistent with Burkina Faso’s harsh conditions
rendering tree survival quite stochastic—actual survival
rates are higher with the linear group payments. The paper
presents field experimental evidence as well as lab
experimental results to explore the mechanisms giving rise
to these results. |
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