Reconciling Global and Local Benefits from Communally Managed Forests: Evidence from a Choice Experiment on PES in Zambia

Agriculture is considered as one of the major drivers of deforestation worldwide. Especially in Africa, this process is driven by small-scale agriculture. Agricultural intensification is widely proposed as measure to reduce pressure on forests. Empirical evidence suggests, however, that win-win relations between agricultural intensification and forest conservation are the exception. As option, payments for ecosystem services (PES) could be linked to small-scale agricultural support programs and safeguard reduced deforestation while achieving agricultural intensification. Nevertheless, little scientific evidence exists regarding perceptions of potential PES recipients for such designs. We report from a discrete choice experiment in Zambia, that elicited preferences of small scale farmers for PES contracts incorporating incentives for agricultural intensification. The experimental design included both monetary and non-monetary contract attributes. Our results suggest that potential PES recipients in Zambia value in-kind agricultural inputs higher than cash payments, highlighting that PES could potentially succeed in conserving forests and intensifying smallscale agriculture. Respondents also put significant emphasis on improved tenure security and non-monetary contract attributes, thus allowing to considerably reduce overall costs of PES if designed appropriately

Payments for ecosystem services and agricultural intensification: Evidence from a choice experiment on deforestation in Zambia

Agriculture is considered to be one of the major drivers of deforestation worldwide. In developing countries in particular this process is driven by small-scale agriculture. At the same time, many African governments aim to increase agricultural productivity. Empirical evidence suggests, however, that win-win relationships between agricultural intensification and forest conservation are the exception. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) could be linked to agriculture support programmes to simultaneously achieve both goals. Due to potentially higher profits from intensified agriculture than from pure cash transfers, potential payment recipients may prefer in-kind over conventional cash payments. Nevertheless, little scientific evidence exists regarding the preferences of potential PES recipients for such instruments. We report from a discrete choice experiment in Zambia that elicited preferences of smallholder farmers for PES contracts. Our results suggest that potential PES recipients in Zambia value in-kind agricultural inputs more highly than cash payments (even when the monetary value of the inputs is lower than the cash payment), highlighting that PES could potentially succeed in conserving forests and intensifying smallholder agriculture. Respondents who intended to clear forest within the next three years were found to require higher payments, but could be motivated to enrol in appropriately designed PES

Identifying governance challenges in ecosystem services management – Conceptual considerations and comparison of global forest cases

Ecosystems around the world generate a wide range of services. Often, there are trade-offs in ecosystem service provision. Managing such trade-offs requires governance of interdependent action situations. We distinguished between (1) enhancing action situations where beneficiaries create, maintain, or improve an ESS and (2) appropriation action situations where actors subtract from a flow of ESS. We classified ESSs in order to identify focal action situations and link them to ESS governance types which are likely to strengthen sustainable ecosystem management. The classification is applied to six forest cases in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Our results confirm that ecosystem management, which more strongly supports the provision of public goods and common pool resources, is often under strong pressure to be transformed into systems that mainly provide private goods. This can be partly explained by incentive constellations in the action situations of public goods and common pool resources. Therefore, governance has to be adapted to specific ESSs. ESS governance needs to identify institutions which best fit to different ESSs and to harmonize them for all the ESSs provided by the system. Our approach helps to understand why institutions fail or succeed in maintaining ESSs

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs

Significance Using experiments involves leeway in choosing one out of many possible experimental designs. This choice constitutes a source of uncertainty in estimating the underlying effect size which is not incorporated into common research practices. This study presents the results of a crowd-sourced project in which 45 independent teams implemented research designs to address the same research question: Does competition affect moral behavior? We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis involving 18,123 experimental participants. Importantly, however, the variation in effect size estimates across the 45 designs is substantially larger than the variation expected due to sampling errors. This “design heterogeneity” highlights that the generalizability and informativeness of individual experimental designs are limited. Abstract Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis

The effects of gender empowerment training on within-group gender differences in performance and overall group performance: A Pre-Analysis Plan

This Pre-Analysis Plan is for a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) for recently formed youth business groups in Tigray Region of Ethiopia. Resource-poor rural youth are given a business opportunity by being allocated a rehabilitated land area where they can establish a joint business. They are organized as a primary cooperative and self-organize with a board of five members including a leader and a vice leader. The overall objective of the project is to identify factors that enhance the performance and sustainability of formal youth groups as a business and livelihood option. The project includes three RCTs and this registration is for one of these RCTs. This study is an RCT that aims to investigate the benefits of training elected female group members in this setting where male group members dominate as group board members and leaders in most groups. The training will consist of training in production planning and marketing and use of mobile phones for these purposes. An additional effect of the training is also to create social networks and professional contacts across groups among female members that receive the joint training. Ethiopian culture is patriarchal, and men have traditionally been household heads and taken up almost all leadership positions in the society. Recent legal reforms in the country have strengthened women’s land rights (Holden et al. 2011). Less is known about the position of women in business. They are supposed to have equal rights to men as members of primary cooperative businesses that we study. However, they are outnumbered by men in such business groups (38% of the members are women), are less likely to be board members (only 24% of the female group members against 38% of male members are board members), and much less likely to be group leaders/vice group leaders (only 4% of females and 22% of males are in such positions) (Holden and Tilahun 2019b). Female group members are also less likely to own mobile phones (31% of female against 72% of male members (Holden and Tilahun 2019b). Mobile phones are instrumental in doing business such as for marketing, organization of groups, and contacting authorities

Citizens' Preferences for Development Outcomes and Governance Implications

People's preferences influence national priorities for economic development and ecological integrity. Often policy makers and development agents base their actions on unclear assumptions about such preferences. This paper explores rural citizens' preferences for economic and ecological development outcomes and how they differ within and between communities. We collected data from three purposely selected communities representing dominant social-ecological systems in the transboundary Cubango-Okavango River Basin in southern Africa. We used contingent ranking survey experiments, which are a novel methodological advance in policy related research. This included a qualitative experimental design process that provided a broad framing underpinning the research. The contingent ranking itself allowed us to simultaneously assess (i) respondents' priorities for development domains; and (ii) respondents' preferences for the ordering of outcomes in diverse domains. We found relatively strong preference homogeneity within and between communities. Economic development was given high priority across all communities. At the same time, all communities expressed a high preference for a healthy river system providing stable water quality and quantity. This does not mean that our respondents prioritized nature conservation. They showed low preferences for preserving biodiversity and forests that provide fewer local benefits. This is of high governance relevance. The results point at development domains where policy makers can most likely expect stronger buy-in from citizens. Understanding citizens' preferences helps to better align national development priorities with what citizens want

The effects of gender empowerment training on within-group gender differences in performance and overall group performance: A Pre-Analysis PlanStein

This Pre-Analysis Plan is for a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) for recently formed youth business groups in Tigray Region of Ethiopia. Resource-poor rural youth are given a business opportunity by being allocated a rehabilitated land area where they can establish a joint business. They are organized as a primary cooperative and self-organize with a board of five members including a leader and a vice leader. The overall objective of the project is to identify factors that enhance the performance and sustainability of formal youth groups as a business and livelihood option. The project includes three RCTs and this registration is for one of these RCTs. This study is an RCT that aims to investigate the benefits of training elected female group members in this setting where male group members dominate as group board members and leaders in most groups. The training will consist of training in production planning and marketing and use of mobile phones for these purposes. An additional effect of the training is also to create social networks and professional contacts across groups among female members that receive the joint training. Ethiopian culture is patriarchal, and men have traditionally been household heads and taken up almost all leadership positions in the society. Recent legal reforms in the country have strengthened women’s land rights (Holden et al. 2011). Less is known about the position of women in business. They are supposed to have equal rights to men as members of primary cooperative businesses that we study. However, they are outnumbered by men in such business groups (38% of the members are women), are less likely to be board members (only 24% of the female group members against 38% of male members are board members), and much less likely to be group leaders/vice group leaders (only 4% of females and 22% of males are in such positions) (Holden and Tilahun 2019b). Female group members are also less likely to own mobile phones (31% of female against 72% of male members (Holden and Tilahun 2019b). Mobile phones are instrumental in doing business such as for marketing, organization of groups, and contacting authorities