Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/26618
Appears in Collections:Biological and Environmental Sciences Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: Estimating welfare impacts where property rights are contested: methodological and policy implications
Author(s): Rakotonarivo, O. Sarobidy
Jacobsen, Jette Bredahl
Poudyal, Mahesh
Rasoamanana, Alexandra
Hockley, Neal
Keywords: Discrete choice experiments
Property rights
Conservation policy
Willingness to accept
Willingness to pay
Issue Date: Jan-2018
Date Deposited: 5-Feb-2018
Citation: Rakotonarivo OS, Jacobsen JB, Poudyal M, Rasoamanana A & Hockley N (2018) Estimating welfare impacts where property rights are contested: methodological and policy implications. Land Use Policy, 70, pp. 71-83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.09.051
Abstract: Where rights over natural resources are contested, the effectiveness of conservation may be undermined and it can be difficult to estimate the welfare impacts of conservation restrictions on local people. In particular, researchers face the dilemma of estimating respondents’ Willingness To Pay (WTP) for rights to resources, or their Willingness To Accept (WTA) compensation for foregoing these rights. We conducted a discrete choice experiment with respondents living next to a new protected area in Madagascar, using a split-sample design to administer both WTP and WTA formats, followed by debriefing interviews. We first examined the differences in response patterns to the formats and their performance in our study context. We also used the two formats to elicit respondents’ attitudes to conservation restrictions and property rights over forestlands. We found that the format affected the relative importance of different attributes: WTA respondents strongly favoured livelihood projects and secure tenure whereas neither attributes were significant for WTP respondents. The WTA format outperformed WTP format on three validity criteria: it was perceived to be more plausible and consequential; led to fewer protest responses; and was more appropriate given very low incomes. Seventy-three percent of respondents did not accept the legitimacy of state protection and strongly aspired to secure forest tenure. The use of a WTP format may thus be inappropriate even if respondents do not hold formal rights over resources. We conclude that estimating the opportunity costs of stopping de jure illegal activities is difficult and coercive conservation lacks procedural legitimacy and may not achieve full compensations. Our findings question the viability of the current conservation model and highlight the importance to conservation policy of locally legitimate property rights over forestlands.
DOI Link: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2017.09.051
Rights: © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/)
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
1-s2.0-S026483771631105X-main.pdfFulltext - Published Version749.72 kBAdobe PDFView/Open



This item is protected by original copyright



A file in this item is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons

Items in the Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

The metadata of the records in the Repository are available under the CC0 public domain dedication: No Rights Reserved https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

If you believe that any material held in STORRE infringes copyright, please contact library@stir.ac.uk providing details and we will remove the Work from public display in STORRE and investigate your claim.