Incentivizing cooperative agreements for sustainable forest management

David McEvoy (), Michael Jones (), Michael McKee and John Talberth

Forest Policy and Economics, 2014, vol. 44, issue C, 34-41

Abstract: Non-industrial private forestland owners (NIPFs) manage the majority of US forestland. But land use conversion is the highest among this group, in part due to the relative paucity of income earned, these agreements can provide opportunities for long term payments from sales of timber and ecosystem services at levels sufficient to reduce the temptation to convert. In this structured well, these agreements can provide opportunities for long term payments from sales of timber and ecosystem services at levels sufficient to reduce the temptation to convert. In this paper we investigate various means of encouraging meaningful participation in cooperative agreements for forests that emphasize conservation. We report on the results obtained through a series of laboratory market experiments in which the participants play the role of NIPFs and make resource allocation decisions facing real financial incentives. Our results shed light on the relative factors that affect the success of these agreements. In particular, we find that when agreements include contribution thresholds (with money back guarantees) coupled with relatively long contract lengths, the groups are able to preserve a significant fraction of forested lands through conservation agreements.

Keywords: Conservation agreement; Participation; Economic laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389934114000550
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:forpol:v:44:y:2014:i:c:p:34-41

DOI: 10.1016/j.forpol.2014.03.006

Access Statistics for this article

Forest Policy and Economics is currently edited by M. Krott

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