Households’ willingness to pay for soil and water conservation practices on communal lands in South Wollo Zone, Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, indigenous soil and water conservation practices are poorly recorded and not considered by soil and water conservation experts and policymakers. Conservation practices have mainly been undertaken in a form of a campaign (top–down approach) and quite often farmers have not been involved in the planning process. For this purpose, the method of Contingent valuation was used to conduct an econometric analysis of willingness to pay using both Double Bounded Dichotomous Choice and open-ended elicitation format question. Both primary and secondary data were collected for analysis using a structured questionnaire. Perception of soil and water conservation and perception of erosion hazard have a positive effect on the households’ willingness to pay for soil and water conservation activities. The result indicates that the value of mean willingness to pay from both Double Bounded Dichotomous Choice and open-ended question were found to be 44.133 and 43.426 Labour Day per household per year, respectively. The paper used the average individual value of willingness-to-pay to calculate the aggregate willingness-to-pay and estimated the aggregate labour day of 6,189,119.07 and 6,090,026.90 labour days per year for the sample districts, respectively. From the result, the laissez-faire approach to communal land soil and water conservation is recommended, since the approach is primarily demand driven, dependable on market forces and voluntary choices of the local communities, and is very likely to induce sufficient investment in soil and water conservation of communal lands.