Economic Experiments for Collective Action in the Kyrgyz Republic: Lessons for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

Abstract

Payments for ecosystem service (PES) schemes have become increasingly popular in attempting to promote ecological stewardship and conservation behaviour through provisioning of economic incentives often as market-inspired transactions. The scholarship and empirical application of PES schemes has tended to focus on contract design and conditionality of payments rather than more fundamentally examining whether incentives do indeed influence behaviour in desired ways. In this paper, a set of incentive framed treatments are introduced to existing collective action institutions promoting common pool resource management in order to explore the effects of incentive provision on the propensity to participate in the maintenance of collectively owned irrigation canals. The experiments take place in the Kyrgyz Republic, characterized by the historic transition of nomadic collective traditions, subsequent Soviet rule, to advances towards democracy, market integration, and the first PES pilot in the country. In the incentive treatments provided, we reveal the close interplay between the framing of incentives, the influence of village leaders mobilizing collective activity and social norms of reciprocity, trust and enforcement in mobilizing collective work. Each framed case study exhibits a unique configuration of individual motivations, group norms and other regarding rationalities, providing critical insight into this new frontier of PES implementation.