Experiments in environment and development
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Farmers are necessary agents in global efforts to conserve the environment now that croplands and pastures together constitute the largest terrestrial system on Earth. Accordingly, multimillion-dollar Payments for Environmental Services (PES) programs that subsidize farmers for conservation are gaining traction around the world. But whereas the history and theory of PES is already established, empirical evidence of its effectiveness in delivering additional and equitable conservation is still sparse. I empirically study additionality and equity of PES using data from a large-scale randomized experiment in Uganda, which I pair with a time series of Landsat satellite imagery. I find that farmers who participate in PES have significantly more photosynthetic vegetation and less non-photosynthetic vegetation on their farms as compared to farmers in the control group. I also find that participation rates among farmers are generally equitable across wealth quintiles. I then examine the factors that explain PES participation by eliciting individual trust and time preferences using a battery of behavioral experiments. I find the first evidence that farmers who exhibit a preference for proximate gains - present-biased preferences - are much more likely to participate in PES than those who show time-consistent or future-biased preferences, holding everything else constant. Finally, I extract substantive and methodological lessons from my first two studies, alongside similar investigations, so that decision makers in other developing countries have a road map for designing randomized experiments that rigorously examine conservation and development interventions.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2014 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Stanton, Charlotte Yandell |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (Stanford University) |
| Primary advisor | Field, Christopher B |
| Primary advisor | Ortolano, Leonard |
| Thesis advisor | Field, Christopher B |
| Thesis advisor | Ortolano, Leonard |
| Thesis advisor | Mooney, Harold A |
| Thesis advisor | Sprenger, Charles |
| Advisor | Mooney, Harold A |
| Advisor | Sprenger, Charles |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Charlotte Yandell Stanton. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Emmett Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2014. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2014 by Charlotte Yandell Stanton
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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