Biodiversity conservation & management Ecological economics Environment & Human Development

PES and motivational crowding in Colombia

In a new article, led by UAB-ICTA’s PhD candidate Lina Moros, we adopt an innovative research design to test for motivational crowding effects through a forest conservation game in Colombia’s Amazon Piedmont, using individual, collective and crop-price premium economic incentives. We implement a post-experiment survey on different types of motivations based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to test for changes in motivations. Our findings show that all types of PES, except for the crop-price premium payment, increased conservation behavior in the experiment. However, not all types of payments affected motivations equally: collective payments enhanced social motivations to protect forests and the crop-price premium reduced intrinsic and guilt/regret related motivations. These findings contribute to disentangling the interaction between incentives, motivations and behaviors in a context of agricultural expansion and growing concern for forest conservation, commonly manifested through incentive-based conservation policies like REDD+ and local projects of Payments for Ecosystem Services.