Lushoto Mountain Squirrel in Mazumbai Forest, Usambara Mountains, Tanzania. The region is one of the richest biodiversity hotspots in the world. Photo by David d’O via Flikr

To understand the term “motivational crowding” in Tanzania’s agroforestry, one needs to go all the way to Israel and into a day care center…

An experiment by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini tried to understand: How can parents be motivated to pick up their children from the day care center on time?  A financial penalty was introduced to reduce the occurrence of the late pickups. But it had the exact opposite effect: the incidence of parents coming late increased distinctly instead of decreasing!  When parents found that they could simply compensate their guilt for a few dollars, many had simply jumped at the opportunity. It turned out that non-financial motivations like the shame of public apology, guilt of being late and inconveniencing others were more effective.

Back to Tanzania and Agroforestry: An experiment in the East Usambara Mountains tried to understand, “Can people be motivated to do conservation via financial compensation and would they continue to do so even after they stop receiving benefits?”

The region is one of the richest biodiversity hotspots in the world. It has a tropical climate where almost anything grows. This study analyses whether an incentive-based policy for promoting agroforestry and forest conservation impacts attitudes towards conservation adversely in the long term. Would payments for ecosystem services (PES) provide a direct incentive to landholders to adopt agroforestry ?

According to Brent Swallow, WCA 2014 presenter from University of Alberta, “Different people treat land differently. Some people see land as a part of life. It is part of an inheritance and as their legacy they want to leave behind a healthy landscape. On the other spectrum we have people who only see land as an economic input. The challenge of this research is to understand the tradeoff between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors which influence behavior. And whether Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) has a negative effect on intrinsic motivation to conserve after policy gets over.”

The research threw up interesting results. It found, for instance, that neither PES nor regulation treatment undermined intrinsic motivation in the long run; in other words, persistent motivational crowding out. In fact, regulation treatments showed some evidence of the opposite: a positive effect beyond the life of the policy. It was also noticed that significantly different responses can be seen from subsets of the same population when exposed to similar choices, even if the population was relatively homogenous in terms of key socio-demographic characteristics. Hence, policy targeting at a subset level might be a more effective strategy.

In all, the research interestingly uses a sociological perspective to provide experimental evidence that overall motivational crowding may not be a large cause for concern regarding the use of PES policies for agroforestry and forest conservation.

By Nitasha Nair

Ms Nair is a Senior Communication Officer with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) – India

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