IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Zabel, A.M. | |
| An assessment of conservation performance payments as policy mechanism to mitigate wildlife-livestock conflicts | |
| 2010 Full Book | |
Biodiversity conservation initiatives and local peoples' requests for unimpaired opportunities to secure their livelihoods often oppose each other. Carnivore conservation programs in regions with many livestock herders are examples where such conflicts of interest are prominent. Several different policy approaches that attempt to foster carnivore conservation have been tested throughout the past decades, but evidence is scarce that they had significant success. Hunting of carnivores in retaliation after predation incidents or as strategy to protect livestock remained fairly common. This thesis addresses the innovative performance payment approach in which individuals or groups of people are rewarded based on measurable conservation outcomes. Sweden was the first country to implement and pioneer this type of payment for environmental services scheme in the context of carnivore-livestock conflicts. In Sweden, Sami villages keep reindeer as semi-domesticated livestock and annually incur great losses due to predation incidents. In the scheme, the villages receive payments contingent on the number of carnivore offspring that are certified on their reindeer grazing grounds. The payments are computed to, at a minimum, offset the damage an individual carnivore is expected to cause to the reindeer industry throughout its lifetime. The questions assessed in this thesis are (i) whether it can be derived from theory that performance payments incentivize livestock herders to let a carnivore population reach a socially optimal size and how performance payments compare to more conventional ex-post compensation, (ii) how payments can be adjusted in the presence of risk and distortion in performance indicators, (iii) what the outcomes and determinants of success in the Swedish scheme are, and (iv) whether the scheme is transferable to a developing country context, in particular to tiger conservation at Bandhavgarh National Park in India. The main conclusions derived in this thesis are that, in theory, performance payments indeed can incentivize a livestock herder to let a carnivore population attain the socially optimal size. Compared to ex-post compensation, performance payments do not give rise to moral hazard, i.e. sub-optimal incentives to protect livestock. Which of the schemes under consideration is less costly is found to be ambiguous. Relative performance evaluation and threshold payments are suggested as special policy design options that can help back out risk i.e. external noise, in performance indicators. Lynx conservation success in the Swedish Sami villages is found to depend on habitat preconditions as well as on typical indicators of collective action: villages' group size and the villages' modalities of internally distributing their performance payments. Wolverine conservation success appears to mainly be a function of available habitat in each village.The transferability of the Swedish scheme to tiger conservation in India is deemed difficult because villages around the park each are smaller on a spatial scale than any single tiger's home range. This makes it difficult to attribute the conservation of a tiger to a certain village. As alternative, a scheme that issues payments contingent on locally observable indicators of intermediate conservation goals is suggested. |
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