Willingness to pay for forest conservation in developing countries: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Environmental contingent valuation (CV) studies in a context of developing countries have been progressing in the past two decades. However, these studies are prone to biases due to their hypothetical nature and most of these studies lack appropriately designed and implemented CV survey. This paper carried out a systematic review of previous 36 forest CV studies conducted in the context of developing countries, focusing on two main objectives: (i) examine communities’ preference and willing to pay (WTP) for forest conservation in developing countries, and (ii) assess content and construct validity of the included studies, using the selected indicators from best practice guidelines recommended in literature. The overall annual mean WTP ranges from $0.01–75.36 and 7.17–94.34 man-days per household for monetary and labor time payment modes, respectively. The results reveal that WTP estimates slightly vary among individual studies within the same country, whereas, the estimates widely vary between countries. These imply that policy designs for forest conservation programs need to give emphasis to the local contexts and other relevant parameters. Moreover, the finding indicates that most of the CV studies included in this review are failed to document and report validity test fully and explicitly as per recommended in literature, despite the existing of some efforts to improve a quality of the studies. Thus, it is strongly suggested that future studies on the theme have to conduct, document and fully report validity test. The finding provides available evidences on accuracy of the prior CV forest studies that could inform policy/users in using the results for decision making.