A field experiment to reduce deforestation while benefiting the livelihoods of Indonesian smallholder oil palm farmers

We will implement a randomised field experiment to test whether a new training intervention delivered to independent smallholder oil palm farmers as part of a palm oil company’s “No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation” (NDPE) policy can reduce deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia. The objective is to identify how NDPE policies can be improved to enhance: 1) their effectiveness in terms of reducing deforestation; 2) farmers’ perceptions of the fairness of NDPE policies; and 3) NDPE policies’ equity in terms of having no negative impact on, or ideally improving, farmers’ market access and prices received for palm oil production. The trial is being conducted in partnership with Musim Mas (MM), an Indonesian palm oil company. The participants will be smallholder oil palm farmers in 87 villages in Aceh Selatan and Aceh Singkil, two regencies (Kabupaten) in the Province of Aceh in Sumatra. The study consists of a common intervention offered to all villages in the sample and an experimental treatment layered on top and randomly assigned to half of the villages. The common intervention comprises a standard training package on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) and Financial Literacy. The experimental treatment consists of training on MM’s NDPE policy with a norm-based framing. We will compare deforestation between villages that receive the baseline intervention and villages that additionally receive the experimental treatment. We will also compare perceived social norms for nature conservation and beliefs about environmentally- and socially-responsible farming behaviour between participants in treated and control villages. We expect a smaller annual reduction in forest cover, an improvement in perceived social importance of conservation, and improvement in beliefs about the importance of environmentally- and socially-responsible farming behaviour in treated villages that receive the norm-based NDPE training compared to control villages that receive the standard training package only