Farmers’ environmental services valuation and forest conservation
Policies such as REDD and payments for ecosystems services rely on the assumption that cash transfers reduce emissions and conserve environmental services by providing farmers incentives to reduce deforestation. These policies ignore farmers’ own interest in environmental services and oversimplify the social, political and institutional complexity that drives farmers’ forest management decisions. In order to address these shortcomings I am conducting a research project on the interaction between farmers’ valuation of environmental services and the broader institutional framework in which they work. Through this project I seek to integrate theories from political science, anthropology, and economics to study collective action, farmers’ environmental services valuation and forest conservation. This research combines ethnographic methods providing in depth knowledge of the context under which deforestation unfolds with surveys of farmers from 88 communities from the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, Maya Biosphere reserves in Guatemala and the Kawal Wildlife Sanctuary and the Amrabad Tiger Reserve in India. The objective is to develop a systematic analysis of how current climate stimuli influences farmers’ ecosystem services valuation and to advance our understanding of how farmers’ valuation together with social, institutional and ecological factors affect farmers’ willingness and ability to conserve the forest and thus reduce carbon emissions.