Mechanisms and impacts of an incentive-based conservation program with evidence from a randomized control trial.

Conservation science needs more high-quality impact evaluations, especially ones that explore mechanisms of success or failure. Randomized control trials (RCTs) provide particularly robust evidence of the effectiveness of interventions (although they have been criticized as reductionist and unable to provide insights into mechanisms), but there have been few such experiments investigating conservation at the landscape scale. We explored the impact of Watershared, an incentive-based conservation program in the Bolivian Andes, with one of the few RCTs of landscape-scale conservation in existence.

The effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Services at delivering improvements in water quality: lessons for experiments at the landscape scale.

Background: Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) are used in impact evaluation in a range of fields. However, despite calls for their greater use in environmental management, their use to evaluate landscape scale interventions remains rare. Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) incentivise land users to manage land to provide environmental benefits.