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Category: 2023

No crowding out among those terminated from an ongoing PES program in Colombia

Esther Blanco, Lina Moros, Alexander Pfaff, Ivo Steimanis, Maria Alejandra Velez, Bjorn Vollan
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 120 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2023.102826

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This paper presents novel evidence of no crowding out, of either motivations or donations, among those terminated from an ongoing program of payments for ecosystem services (PES) in Colombia. PES programs have risen in number. However, claims about perverse impacts after programs end could inhibit their growth. PES end for different reasons (planned duration, budget reduction, issues in implementation) and in different ways (some participants or all). An expressed concern for PES is that receiving payments lowers conservation, after PES end, if participants’ intrinsic motivations for conservation are ‘crowded out’ by financial incentives. We test for crowding out by an ongoing program in which some but not all contracts were terminated. We see no evidence of crowding out, since neither the motivations nor the donations for the terminated farmers are significantly different than for non-PES land owners (and this is robust to matching on levels of assets, residence on farm past donation behavior, main economic activity, and participation in collective activities). Our results add evidence from an actual PES to literature questioning the relevance, importance and even sign of crowding effects.

 

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Forest Concessions and Eco-Certifications in the Peruvian Amazon: deforestation impacts of logging rights and logging restrictions

Jimena Rico-Straffon, Zhenhua Wang, Stephanie Panlasigui, Colby J. Loucks, Jennifer Swenson, Alexander Pfaff
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 118 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2022.102780

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Concessions that grant logging rights to firms support economic development based on forest resources. Eco-certifications put sustainability restrictions on the operations of those concessions. For spatially detailed data, including many pre-treatment years, we use new difference-indifferences estimators to estimate 2002–2018 impacts upon Peruvian Amazon forests from both logging concessions and their eco-certifications. We find that the concessions — which in theory could raise or reduce forest loss — did not raise loss, if anything reducing it slightly by warding off spikes in deforestation pressure. Eco-certifications could reduce or raise forest loss, yet we find no significant impacts.

 

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Temporary PES do not crowd out and may crowd in lab-in-the-field forest conservation in Colombia

Lina Moros, Maria Alejandra Velez, Daniela Quintero, Danny Tobin, Alexander Pfaff
Ecological Economics 204 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107652

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Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs exist globally and at times shift behaviors. Unlike protected areas, PES compensate land users, raising local acceptance of conservation. Yet some worry that if payments are temporary, as is often the case, conservation behaviors can be reduced by PES, ‘crowded out’ to be lower after PES than if no PES had existed. We conducted lab-in-the-field experiments in Colombia, where PES policies are expanding, offering either individual or collective conditional payments to 676 farmers who are potential PES participants. Those payments end, within each experimental session, for all or only for some participants. We consistently find that conservation is not lower after PES than before. Also, conservation contributions tend to fall over time without PES, in keeping with public-goods literatures. Taken together, these results imply that even after our payments end, conservation is above the baseline defined by our controls, suggesting some form of (at least short-run) crowding in.

 

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