Payments for Environmental Services, Forest Conservation and Climate Change: Livelihoods in the REDD?

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are instruments which seem well suited for forest conservation. However, their impact on reducing deforestation might be weakened by negligible additionality and leakage effects; the first refers to the low variation in net deforestation rates even in the absence of PES, and the second refers to the displaced deforestation behavior to other areas not covered by PES. For the case of Ecuador, we examine both issues by assessing the historical deforestation trend of selected PES-enrolled areas and that of their adjacent areas to identify deforestation patterns before and after PES implementation. We analyze the additional effect of PES on reducing deforestation by comparison to a baseline as well as to comparable reference sites at two different spatial scales. We also analyze potential leakage effects of PES by comparing deforestation development in adjacent areas. We show that PES has achieved marginally low conservation impacts in enrolled areas with an average difference in net deforestation rates of 0.02 percent points over a period of 28 years. Overall, PES-enrolled areas depict lower annual net deforestation rates than unenrolled areas, albeit at a negligible rate, and there is also some evidence that deforestation decreased in adjacent areas after PES implementation. Additionally, there exists a statistically significant linear increasing deforestation trend in adjacent areas as distance increases from the PES-enrolled area. Our empirical results, however, raise the suspicion that the choice of PES-enrolled areas might have been influenced by self-selection.

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No sense of ownership in weak participation: a forest conservation experiment in Tanzania

Environment and Development Economics ◽

10.1017/s1355770x18000190 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 23 (4) ◽

pp. 434-451 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Øyvind Nystad Handberg

Keyword(s):

Forest Conservation ◽

Stakeholder Participation ◽

Environmental Services ◽

Payments For Environmental Services ◽

Institutional Performance ◽

Local Participation ◽

Sense Of Ownership ◽

Tropical Forest Conservation ◽

Local Stakeholders ◽

The Given

AbstractSense of ownership is often advocated as an argument for local participation within the epistemic development and nature conservation communities. Stakeholder participation in initiating, designing or implementing institutions is claimed to establish a sense of ownership among the stakeholders and subsequently improve the intended outcomes of the given institution. Theoretical and empirical justifications of the hypothesis remain scarce. A better understanding of the effects of local participation can motivate more extensive and stronger participation of local stakeholders and improve institutional performance. This paper applies theories from psychology and behavioral economics to sense of ownership. The empirical investigation is a framed field experiment in the context of tropical forest conservation and payments for environmental services in Tanzania. The results lend little support to the hypothesis in this context. The participation treatment in the experiment is weak, and a possible explanation is that sense of ownership is sensitive to the participation form.

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