Angelsen, Arild

This paper examines the role of inequality in shaping perceptions of fairness of different conservation mechanisms. Agent heterogeneity and inequality have been recognized as an important element influencing collective action in environmental conservation contexts, as well as the effectiveness of institutional settings that seek to promote it. In unequal settings, fairness considerations have been shown to influence people’s behavior, but less attention has been paid to the specific mechanisms through which inequality can, in fact, affect fairness perceptions of the policies that promote environmental conservation. We utilized a multi-country CPR framed field experiment (FFE) implemented in Peru, Brazil, and Indonesia, framed as a linear public good game with forest extraction, where participants could make land use change decisions over multiple rounds. We exploit an inequality treatment introduced as differences in deforestation capacity—or the maximum number of forest plots that a participant could convert to agricultural land. In this context, the FFE included different institutional settings to reduce free-riding, or over-conversion of land use, including external government enforcement and peer enforcement. We use data from this experiment to examine equity perceptions of government and peer enforcement, and to assess differences in those equity perceptions between advantaged resource users (those with high deforestation capacity) and disadvantaged resource users (those with low deforestation capacity).

Inequalities among community members can influence the effectiveness of interventions intending to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, even when the forested areas are managed collectively. In particular, differences in the baseline capacity to secure out-of-farm sources of income or sustainable productive systems may limit the perceived benefits of program incentives to conserve the forests or exacerbate the costs of disincentives like fees. To assess the degree to which inequalities have a meaningful impact on the effectiveness of different intervention strategies, we implemented a framed field experiment (FFE) in Peru and Brazil, combined with detailed household data about different sources of inequality, including income, and productive capacity. With the FFE, we compared three strategies to reduce the free rider problem in a collective PES program: (i) Public monitoring of individual deforestation, (ii) monitoring with peer sanctions (community enforcement), and (iii) monitoring with external sanctions (government enforcement). We implemented these different strategies in a context of wealth inequality, framed as differences in deforestation capacity. This setting thus allows us to consider the combined effect of “real-life” as well as “induced” inequalities in the context of the framed experiment. The preliminary findings show that wealthier participants (in the FFE) with high deforestation capacity tended to be more responsive to (the threat of) sanctions than their poorer counterparts. This effect was reinforced with real-life wealth conditions, thus wealthier participants both in the game and in real life showed higher favorability to advantageous inequality. This finding suggests that baseline inequality has important implications for PES design, considering that the mechanisms included to promote conservation may need to be tailored to subgroups of wealth within the intervened communities to improve effectiveness.