A field experiment on removing conditionality in environmental conservation payments

Incentivizing natural resource owners to adopt behaviors and practices that protect the environment has become a dominant approach to environmental conservation. It promotes the instrumental value of nature by aligning natural resource owners’ private gain with the general public’s benefits from nature. Incentives are believed to require strict accountability mechanisms, to guarantee compliance and impacts. An extensive literature, however, demonstrates that many individuals – particularly rural inhabitants of the Global South, who often live in environmental hotspots in most need of conservation – place high non-monetary value on nature and possess strong intrinsic motivation to protect the environment. The strict conditions associated with environmental protection payments may therefore not be necessary, or even do more harm than good. We analyze the impacts of unconditional versus conditional payments on environmental and socioeconomic outcomes. We find that both payment types yield similar performance, albeit at a different cost, which could help unconditional payments increase scale and total benefits. The results emphasize the need for environmental conservation approaches to consider non-instrumental valuations of nature, leveraging people’s intrinsic and relational motivations to take part in efforts to conserve the environment.