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Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation

Nature Sustainability volume 1, pages 128–135 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a popular strategy for environmental protection, and tropical forest conservation in particular. Little is known, however, about their effectiveness. Many argue that even if PES increase conservation while payments last, they may adversely affect other motivations for pro-environmental behaviour in the longer term. We test whether conditional payments also encourage forest users to conserve shared forest resources after payments end. Using a framed field experiment with 1,200 tropical forest users in five countries, we show that (1) during the intervention, conditional payments increased conservation behaviour; (2) after payments stopped, users continued to conserve more on average than they did before the intervention, especially when they were able to communicate with each other; and (3) trust amplified the lasting conservation effects of the interventions. PES effectiveness may increase when interventions facilitate interpersonal communication and when implemented in contexts where forest users enjoy high levels of trust.

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Fig. 1: Aggregate-level harvesting patterns across stages of the game.
Fig. 2: Predicted individual-level harvest in pretreatment and post-treatment stages for individuals with varying levels of trust who received the bonus-with-communication treatment, with 95% confidence intervals.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Agrawal, R. Chazdon, P. Magnuszewski, J. Menken, P. Newton, M. Pajak, S.M. Smith, J. Stefanska, M. Trautmann and P. Valdivieso for constructive comments on earlier drafts of the paper. We also thank L. Schultz for valuable editorial assistance. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (grants DEB-1114984, BCS-1115009 and SMA-328688), as well as the Center for International Forestry Research (through grants from the European Commission and the UK Department for International Development).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Krister P. Andersson & Nathan J. Cook

  2. Department of Political Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Tara Grillos

  3. Department of Community Sustainability, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Maria Claudia Lopez

  4. Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden

    Carl F. Salk

  5. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Carl F. Salk

  6. Department of Political Science, University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, AK, USA

    Glenn D. Wright

  7. Center for International Forestry Research, Nairobi, Kenya

    Esther Mwangi

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  1. Krister P. Andersson
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Contributions

K.P.A., C.F.S. and G.D.W. conceived of the project, M.C.L., K.P.A., C.F.S. and E.M. designed the experiments, M.C.L. and E.M. conducted the experiments, N.J.C. and T.G. developed the analysis approach, N.J.C. analysed the data and K.P.A., T.G. and N.J.C. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Krister P. Andersson.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion, Methods and References, plus Supplementary Tables 1–10 and Supplementary Figures 1–3

Supplementary Data File

Two datasets, Balance test script, R script, guide to the data files

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Andersson, K.P., Cook, N.J., Grillos, T. et al. Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation. Nat Sustain 1, 128–135 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0034-z

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