Abstract
ABSTRACT As the world’s largest payments for ecosystem services (PES) program, China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) is designed to combat soil erosion and land degradation by converting cropland on steep slopes into forests. Operating through an incentive-based approach, the SLCP involved 32 million rural households as core agents. This paper aims to fill a research gap regarding how socioeconomic and institutional conditions influence rural households to reach the primary environmental goals. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), we conclude that at the household level, the different pathways to environmental success or failure have been shaped by socioeconomic and institutional conditions in a combinatory manner rather than single conditions alone. Specifically, the combination of household involvement and effective monitoring plays a fundamental role in capacity-building between government and households. We found that financial incentives have a trade-off effect, as they could not only create a positive interaction but also trigger failure in situations with different conditions. Finally, the potential and limits of QCA were discussed, and we call for a more serious reflection on the added value of QCA as an alternative or complementary method to conventional approaches in environmental governance research.
Highlights
IntroductionThe Chinese Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), initiated in 1999, is considered one of the largest governmental Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs in the world due to its broad geographic cover, wide participation and tremendous investment (Zhen and Zhang 2011)
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) has been a popular approach to address environmental degradation in recent years
We show that 16 of 59 households had successfully implemented the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) and that 9 households had reconverted their SLCPenrolled land back to agricultural use
Summary
The Chinese Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), initiated in 1999, is considered one of the largest governmental PES programs in the world due to its broad geographic cover, wide participation and tremendous investment (Zhen and Zhang 2011). This program aimed to reduce soil erosion and support rural economic development by reforesting approximately 14.67 million hectares of cropland countrywide (State Forest Administration 2003). With an explicit emphasis on voluntary participation and local autonomy in the policy’s design, the SLCP directly engaged over 32 million households as core agents of program implementation (State Forest Administration 2007). An open question remains concerning whether the SLCP is an institutional innovation or just ‘business as usual’ (Bennett 2008)
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