Conference Agenda

Tropical deforestation creates serious local and global externalities. Ecopayments or Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) offer conditional transfers that can increase conservation when they are well designed and targeted. However, impacts may be limited if participants were already conserving prior to enrollment, as may occur when other conservation or land-right policies have been implemented. To inform PES targeting, we assess “conservation redundancy” by estimating forest impacts of Ecuador’s SocioBosque (SB) ecopayments program on Amazonian frontiers, both alone and in combination with Protected Areas (PAs) or Indigenous Lands (ILs). We distinguish between SB’s smaller Individual and larger Collective contracts across the following policy configurations: SB alone; SB + PA; SB + IL; and SB+PA+IL. Using remotely sensed forest data, we apply Difference-in-Difference estimators and find some forest impact of SB Collective alone, with larger but imprecise effects for SB Individual alone. In specific, we find no additional effect from SB Collective within PAs and no significant additional effect when SB is combined with ILs or PA+IL, indicating substantial policy redundancy.