Fair payments for effective environmental conservation

The results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), by researchers from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Germany and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU).

Much of the world's biodiversity is found in tropical countries, frequently in regions with low household incomes. Paying local people to help with conservation efforts, for instance by working on reforestation projects or changing their hunting habits, is increasingly seen as a win-win solution. But how do policymakers know what makes a program effective?

One answer is to try different programs in many villages, collecting detailed data on outcomes – an effective but slow and expensive solution. Alternatively, you can ask local people what they prefer, but this may be unreliable if proposed programs are different from anything they know. A third way is to use behavioural experiments.

"Field experiments combine the realism of full-scale trials with the speed and modest cost of surveys" says Carl Salk, an SLU researcher and co-author on the study. "In my experience the participants nearly always have fun, and earn a bit of money while helping improve conservation programs."

The study examined how fairness perceptions affect work effort. Over 400 Vietnamese farmers filled bags with fertile soil for growing tree seedlings. The researchers structured the payments to create inequality – farmers received either a high or low payment for each bag they filled. They were either in a group where everyone got the same payment or in which payments differed.

"It might seem strange that people in a group get different payments for the same work. In this study, it was a necessary feature to study the consequences of unfairness, but is not as unusual as it might seem. We see people receiving different wages for the same task all over the world, for instance the gender pay gap," says co-author Jens Rommel, an SLU researcher.

"Payment inequality had clear impacts. In the mixed groups, participants receiving the low rate feel treated unfairly and work less. We also see that women work harder" says Lasse Loft from ZALF who led the study.

Both findings are important lessons for conservation policy design. They provide evidence that fairness is not just a desirable side objective, but a central design feature. Targeting women and following local cultures' fairness norms can produce more conservation without a bigger budget.

The study took place in the buffer zone of a national park in Vietnam. The region is threatened by forest degradation and is part of the nationwide Vietnamese Payments for Forest Ecosystem Services program. More than 30,000 soil bags were produced during the study. They were donated to local tree nurseries for reforestation work.

Contact persons at SLU

Carl Salk
Researcher at the Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre,
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp
carl.salk@slu.se, https://www.slu.se/en/ew-cv/carl-salk/

Jens Rommel
Researcher at the Department of Economics; Decision-making and Managerial Behavior,
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala
jens.rommel@slu.se, https://www.slu.se/en/ew-cv/jens-rommel/

The article

Lasse Loft, Stefan Gehrig, Carl Salk & Jens Rommel. Fair payments for effective environmental conservation. PNAS (2020). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919783117