Performance of Incentive Schemes in Enhancing Conservation Effectiveness and Landscape Connectivity under Land Heterogeneity: Evidence from Ecological Corridors in Tanzania.

Landscape connectivity plays an important role for the conservation of biodiversity and can be improved through the protection of ecological corridors between protected areas. Most of these corridors in Tanzania are on privately owned farmland, where subsistence farming is practised by village farmers. Conservation of these corridors are challenged by limited willingness of farmers to retire their farmlands for conservation. While conservation yields public benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation, they also require farmers to reduce agricultural activities and forgo private financial benefits. Trade-offs between conservation and crop farming may be motivated by monetary or non-monetary motives. Whether the former or the latter prevails is still debatable; rational farmers are likely to be motivated by monetary incentives, while pro-conservationist are likely to act altruistically and opt to conserve, in particular if exposed to nudges such as conservation sensitization. Both motives are interlinked. As such, monetary rewards for pro-environmental behaviour might interact with non-monetary motivations, resulting in crowding-out or crowding-in of intrinsic conservation behaviour. For the past three decades, most conservation interventions embarked on incentive schemes to convince farmers to retire their agricultural land for conservation purposes. However, these schemes have been designed under considerable uncertainties regarding their effectiveness in terms of conservation outcomes. Payment of fixed subsidies is the most common scheme, which has often resulted in isolated patches of conserved land. An agglomeration bonus (AB) has been proposed to complement subsidies in order to persuade farmers to retire land in a systematic way. AB has been reported to be a cost-effective and efficient incentive, which can yield a contiguous habitat through coordination of farmer’s decision. While theory underlying the AB predict optimal conservation outcome, a number of economic lab experiments have reported conservation failure. It is not clear how these incentives will perform in a framed field setting. Since the coordination is central to performance of AB, unequal farmland distribution in terms of size and productivity amongst land owners might play a role for the willingness of farmers to retire land for conservation purposes. As such, land heterogeneity adds to the uncertainties in terms of conservation outcomes of incentives. Vast strands of literature have shown that communication can ease coordination and therefore conservation outcome; however, the mechanism through which communication supports coordination remains unclear. In particular, the role of opinion leadership in communication received limited attention. We hypothesize that communication works when opinion leadership exists. In this study, we aim to assess the performance of different incentive scheme designs in enhancing conservation effectiveness and landscape connectivity under land heterogeneity and explore the mechanism through which opinion leadership in communication ease coordination. We are specifically interested in addressing four main hypotheses using a framed field experiment in two ecological corridors in Tanzania.