RESUMO
Payments for environmental services (PES) programs incentivize landowners to protect or improve natural resources. Many conservationists fear that introducing compensation for actions previously offered voluntarily will reduce social capital (the institutions, relationships, attitudes, and values that govern human interactions), yet little rigorous research has investigated this concern. We examined the land cover management and communal social capital impacts of Mexico's federal conservation payments program, which is a key example for other countries committed to reducing deforestation, protecting watersheds, and conserving biodiversity. We used a regression discontinuity (RD) methodology to identify causal program effects, comparing outcomes for PES participants and similar rejected applicants close to scoring cutoffs. We found that payments increased land cover management activities, such as patrolling for illegal activity, building fire breaks, controlling pests, or promoting soil conservation, by â¼50%. Importantly, increases in paid activities as a result of PES did not crowd out unpaid contributions to land management or other prosocial work. Community social capital increased by â¼8-9%, and household-level measures of trust were not affected by the program. These findings demonstrate that major environmental conditional cash transfer programs can support both land management and the attitudes and institutions underpinning prosocial behavior. Rigorous empirical research on this question can proceed only country by country because of methodological limitations, but will be an important line of inquiry as PES continues to expand worldwide.
Assuntos
Conservação dos Recursos Naturais/economia , Modelos Econômicos , Capital Social , Humanos , MéxicoRESUMO
Natural resource managers are often expected to achieve both environmental protection and economic development even when there are fundamental trade-offs between these goals. Adaptive management provides a theoretical structure for program administrators to balance social priorities in the presence of trade-offs and to improve conservation targeting. We used the case of Mexico's federal Payments for Hydrological Services program (PSAH) to illustrate the importance of adaptive management for improving program targeting. We documented adaptive elements of PSAH and corresponding changes in program eligibility and selection criteria. To evaluate whether these changes resulted in enrollment of lands of high environmental and social priority, we compared the environmental and social characteristics of the areas enrolled in the program with the characteristics of all forested areas in Mexico, all areas eligible for the program, and all areas submitted for application to the program. The program successfully enrolled areas of both high ecological and social priority, and over time, adaptive changes in the program's criteria for eligibility and selection led to increased enrollment of land scoring high on both dimensions. Three factors facilitated adaptive management in Mexico and are likely to be generally important for conservation managers: a supportive political environment, including financial backing and encouragement to experiment from the federal government; availability of relatively good social and environmental data; and active participation in the review process by stakeholders and outside evaluators.