Pay little, get little; pay more, get a little more: A framed forest experiment in Tanzania

Øyvind Handberg () and Arild Angelsen

Ecological Economics, 2019, vol. 156, issue C, 454-467

Abstract: How do different levels of individual payments for environmental services (PES) affect intrinsic and social motivations for forest conservation? Does introducing small PES crowd out these motivations? This paper presents findings from framed field experiments (FFE) conducted with local forest users in Tanzania. The payoff structure represents a common-pool resource situation; participants' payoffs depend on the number of trees harvested, and aggregate over-harvesting can harm future harvest. Four levels of individual PES are tested in a between-group design: no (0%), low (20%), medium (60%) and full (100%) PES, where the level is relative to the harvest value. We observe lower than theoretically predicted harvest rates at no, low and medium PES, while the opposite is true at full PES. The results suggest that low PES has little impact on local forest use in Tanzania and has on aggregate no significant effect on intrinsic and social motivations. Increasing payments has a negative, but diminishing effect on harvest rates.

Keywords: Field experiment; PES; REDD; Crowding-out; Forest management; Tanzania (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 Q23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916300416
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Pay little, get little; pay more, get a little more: A framed forest experiment in Tanzania (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:156:y:2019:i:c:p:454-467

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.09.025

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().