Abstract
Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes. Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, it may also facilitate conditioning on additionality (i.e., conditioning payments upon clearly improved outcomes relative to baseline). Yet collective contracting often suffers from free-riding, which undermines group outcomes and may be exacerbated or ameliorated by PES designs. We study impacts of conditioning on additionality within a number of collective PES designs. We use a framed field-laboratory experiment with participants from a new PES program in Mexico. Because social interactions are critical within collective processes, we assess the impacts from conditioning on additionality given: (1) group participation in contract design, and (2) a group coordination mechanism. Conditioning on above-baseline outcomes raised contributions, particularly among initially lower contributors. Group participation in contract design increased impact, as did the coordination mechanism.
Highlights
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs offer contracts in which landholders are paid for specified environmental actions or outcomes
We explore the differential impacts of conditionality on additionality with the same difference-in-differences regression augmented with an interaction term that includes the average of the underlying measure used for group sorting
The post-policy (R9-12) average treatment effect (ATE) is positive and significant but, not surprisingly, is considerably smaller (0.42–0.49 units). This persistent impact from the temporary treatment suggests that a durable shift in preferences for cooperative behavior was induced by the external incentive – a process known as “internalization” in the social psychology literature (Ryan and Deci, 2000)
Summary
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs offer contracts in which landholders are paid for specified environmental actions or outcomes. Recent decades have seen rapid growth in PES programs (Ferraro, 2011; Porras et al, 2008). In many lower-income settings, PES programs have become a preferred policy approach due to their potential to better balance conservation and livelihood outcomes relative to other types of conservation policies (Ferraro and Kiss, 2002; Leimona, 2009; Pagiola et al, 2005; Sims and Alix-Garcia, 2017; Wunder, 2007).
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