Adding rewards to regulation: The impacts of watershed conservation on land cover and household wellbeing in Moyobamba, Peru

PLoS One. 2019 Nov 20;14(11):e0225367. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225367. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

We estimate the effects of Peru's oldest watershed payments for environmental services (PES) initiative in Moyobamba (Andes-Amazon transition zone) and disentangle the complex intervention into its two main forest conservation treatments. First, a state-managed protected area (PA) was established, allowing sustainable use but drastically limiting de facto land use and land rights of households in the upper watershed through command-and-control interventions. Second, a subset of those environmentally regulated households also received incentives: PES-like voluntary contracts with conditional in-kind rewards, combined with access to participation in sustainable income-generating activities of the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) type. To evaluate impacts, we perform matching procedures and adjustment regressions to obtain the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of each intervention. We investigate impacts on plot-level forest cover and household welfare for the period 2010-2016. We find that both treatments-command-and-control restrictions and the incentive package-modestly but significantly mitigated primary forest loss. Incentive-induced conservation gains came at elevated per-hectare implementation costs. We also find positive effects on incentive-treated households' incomes and assets; however, their self-perceived wellbeing counterintuitively declined. We hypothesise that locally frustrated beneficiary expectations vis-a-vis the ambitiously designed PES-cum-ICDP intervention help explain this surprising finding. We finalise with some recommendations for watershed incentives and policy mix design in Moyobamba and beyond.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Conservation of Natural Resources / economics*
  • Conservation of Natural Resources / methods
  • Family Characteristics
  • Forests*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Peru
  • Reward*

Grants and funding

This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada through Project entitled “Using an Environmental Economics Perspective to Influence Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean - Latin American and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program (LACEEP)”. Additional funds to the first author were provided by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico, Tecnológico y de Innovación Tecnológica (FONDECYT), an initiative of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Tecnológica (CONCYTEC-Peru). We also acknowledge funding from the European Commission (SINCERE, H2020 GA 773702) and the CGIAR’s Forest, Trees and Agroforestry programme. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.