Gender aspects in action- and outcome-based payments for ecosystem services—A tree planting field trial in Kenya
Introduction
Market-based policy instruments have been increasingly applied to procure ecosystem services in the past three decades, whereas payments for ecosystem services (PES) represent the mostly used mechanism (Schilizzi and Latacz-Lohmann, 2016). Conservation payments convert “external, non-market environmental values into financial incentives” for private landholders (Engel et al., 2008, p. 664), as they offer payments/compensate for their provision of ecosystem services (Pagiola et al., 2005, Wunder, 2005). PES have been extensively applied to watershed protection, addressing conflicts between up-stream landholders who impact the water quality and quantity and downstream water users (Escobar et al., 2013, Richards et al., 2017).
In terms of PES contracts, two approaches have emerged, namely, outcome- and action-based conservation payments. In the context of enhancing PES performance, linking payments to outcomes is argued to boost PES effectiveness, as opposed to conservation payments for compliance with action prescriptions. The outcome-based contract design gives landholders the flexibility to achieve the desired environmental outcome and is expected to increase intrinsic motivation, resulting in increased environmental performance but decreased private compliance costs (Holm-Müller et al., 2006, Latacz-Lohmann and Schilizzi, 2005, Matzdorf and Lorenz, 2010, Schwarz et al., 2008). However, outcome-based approaches impose the additional risk of not achieving the desired goals, so they may induce participants to request risk premiums (Latacz-Lohmann and Schilizzi, 2005, Schwarz et al., 2008, Wätzold and Schwerdtner, 2005, Zabel and Roe, 2009).
A major challenge in PES schemes is how to select the contracts under a budget constraint (Hajkowicz et al., 2007). Additionally, asymmetric information exists between landowners and the conservation agency, which can limit the effectiveness of PES programs (Ferraro, 2008). Procurement auctions among suppliers of ecosystem services reveal their opportunity costs, as the participants compete for a limited number of conservation contracts. The bids, however, also contain bidder’s expectations about the maximum payment; thus, they do not represent true opportunity costs (Ferraro, 2008, Latacz-Lohmann and Schilizzi, 2005, Latacz-Lohmann and Van der Hamsvoort, 1997).
Linking the two above contexts, the outcome-based approach and tendering contracts could improve PES effectiveness. However, theoretical predictions on allocating outcome-based contracts via an auction are ambiguous. Specifically, while auctions are expected to decrease the informational rents, linking payments to outcomes increases risk for participants (Schilizzi et al., 2011, Schilizzi and Latacz-Lohmann, 2016). Moreover, specific opportunities and challenges exist for tendering conservation contracts in low-income countries (Wünscher and Wunder, 2017). Field trials in Indonesia and Malawi contributed to the little evidence on the performance of tendering in developing countries (Ajayi et al., 2012, Jack, 2010, Jack, 2013, Jack et al., 2009). This case study directly compares the auctions for action- and outcome-based conservation contracts in Kenya. Because we have reason to believe that a participant’s gender might influence bidding behavior and PES schemes in general, we also examine gendered impacts on the two contract types.
PES schemes have been increasingly implemented in developing countries, which represent important suppliers of ecosystem services (Kerr et al., 2012, Swallow et al., 2009, Wunder et al., 2008). In developing countries, despite some progress over the past two decades, gender-related inequalities are prevalent, wherein in agriculture women have limited access to productive resources, grow less profitable crops and women’s rights to land often depend on their marital status (FAO, 2011, GEF, 2013, Kiptot and Franzel, 2011, World Bank, 2012). In Africa, despite being recognized as key actors in agriculture, women face difficulties accessing financial credits, appropriate technology and extension services and are more labor constrained (Kiptot and Franzel, 2011, Kiptot et al., 2014). Eliminating the gender imbalance would lead to higher agricultural productivity (FAO, 2011, Murage et al., 2015).
While gender impacts have been sufficiently investigated with respect to agricultural production, limited evidence exists for gender impacts in food security (Kiptot et al., 2014), in forestry and conservation (Colfer and Minarchek, 2013) and for PES in particular. Kiptot et al. (2014) argue that addressing gender gaps in Africa will potentially reduce poverty and improve food security, provision of ecosystem services, as well as climate change mitigation. However, the few studies on gender and conservation show ambivalent results. On the one hand, mixed-gender decision-making is shown to possibly improve environmental outcomes and food security (Villamor et al., 2014b) and to result in the maintenance of protection forests and agroforestry (Villamor et al., 2017), while on the other hand, women react more positively than men to logging and oil palm conversion (Villamor et al., 2014a, p. 752).
Hence, in this study, we were interested in exploring gendered performance in PES contracts, given the notion of differential land rights and thus, decision-making powers not only to generate insights on how a gender-responsive PES scheme might be developed but also to contribute to the literature on gender and PES. Without undermining family labor’s contribution to the delivery of PES contracts, our focus was on the behavior of men (usually the husband and household head) and women (the wife, and in some cases, the household head) towards PES contracts. We argue that traditional gender roles imply gender differences in the willingness to accept PES contracts and in environmental performance. Moreover, we hypothesize that men and women might react differently to the incentives given in the action- and outcome-based PES schemes. With respect to the latter, studies show that the decisions on agroforestry and other livelihood opportunities reflect gender differences in “exposure to and perceptions of risks” (Villamor et al., 2014b, p. 128) and that “men and women may differ in their willingness to assume risks with respect to the provision of ecosystem services” (Villamor and van Noordwijk, 2016, p. 77). The objectives of this study were (i) to compare the performance of auctions for action- and outcome-based contracts and to examine the impacts of gender on the PES schemes as well as (ii) to explore the relationships between gender impacts on PES and gender roles and behavior.
Section snippets
Study area
We conducted the study in the Kapingazi River catchment of the Upper Tana River watershed in Kenya (Fig. 1), where intensive agricultural land use and deforestation have resulted in severe soil erosion and stream siltation and where there is a high potential for conservation payments to reverse the degradation (Balana et al., 2011, Hoang et al., 2014, PRESA, 2010). The Kapingazi River begins at the Mt. Kenya forest boundary at approximately 2000 meters above sea level and joins the larger
Gender and conservation auctions
We analyzed the bids submitted in the two conservation auctions (treatments) to examine men and women’s willingness to accept the action- and outcome-based contracts. The mean bid was 334 USD (29,406 KSh) in the auction for action-based contracts and 297 USD (26,126 KSh) in the auction for outcome-based contracts.6 The standard deviations were 369 USD and 145 USD, respectively. The minimum and
Conclusion
The randomized field trial revealed that participants’ genders significantly impacted the willingness to accept and environmental performances in the action- and outcome-based tree planting PES schemes. We found associations between gender effects and men’s and women’s traditional roles and risk behaviors.
First, we found differences in contract utilities and relative risk aversion to provide possible explanations for the 36% decrease in women’s compared to men’s bids in the auction for
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to Prof. Dr. Joachim von Braun, Dr. B. Kelsey Jack, Dr. Sara Namirembe and Elsa Cardona Santos for the valuable recommendations on the study design and evaluation. We highly appreciate Guido Lüchters for his kind support and advice on statistical analysis. We are very grateful to Miika Mäkelä for providing geodatabases of the Kapingazi catchment and Olena Dubovyk for generating the study area map. We gratefully acknowledge the field assistants and the
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2022, Science of the Total EnvironmentCitation Excerpt :In other cases, even contextualized field experiments may decide not to target specific ES because they are action- or outcome-based rather than benefit-based. For example, Andeltová et al. (2019) conducted an auction-based field experiment to increase the forested area on agricultural lands. Rather than focusing on the benefits associated with reforestation, performance indicators included the number of trees planted and survival ratio.
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2021, Ecological EconomicsCitation Excerpt :Thus, considering equity aspects in PES design and implementation is hypothesized to be conducive to improving not only the social, but also the environmental outcomes of PES (Liu and Kontoleon, 2018). More recently, it appears these diverse schools of thought are beginning to converge on the shared view that, especially in the Global South, social equity considerations are an ineludible component in the design of PES, which should still reflect basic economic design principles (Wunder et al., 2018; Andeltová et al., 2019). Nevertheless, a need for more empirical evidence to test these competing hypotheses has repeatedly been noted (Halpern et al., 2013; Calvet-Mir et al., 2015; Wegner, 2016; Blundo-Canto et al., 2018).
- 1
Present affiliation: Federal Office for Agriculture and Food, Deichmanns Aue 29, 53179 Bonn, Germany.
- 2
Present affiliation: EARTH University, P.O. Box 4442-1000, San José, Costa Rica.