Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Payments for ecosystem services did not crowd out pro-environmental behavior: Long-term experimental evidence from Uganda.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Payments for ecosystem services did not crowd out pro-environmental behavior: Long-term experimental evidence from Uganda.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Pricing instruments in environmental and climate policy when polluters are boundedly rational.npj climate action · 2025Article
- Exploring local perceptions and drivers of engagement in biodiversity monitoring among participants in payments for ecosystem services schemes in southeastern Mexico.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly being implemented worldwide as conservation instruments that provide conditional economic incentives to landowners for a prespecified duration. However, in the psychological and economic literature, critics have raised concerns that PES can undermine the recipient's intrinsic motivation to engage in pro-environmental behavior. Such "crowding out" may reduce the effectiveness of PES and may even worsen conservation outcomes once programs are terminated. In this study, we harnessed a randomized controlled trial that provided PES to land users in Western Uganda and evaluated whether these incentives had a persistent effect on pro-environmental behavior and its underlying behavioral drivers 6 y after the last payments were made. We elicited pro-environmental behavior with an incentivized, experimental measure that consisted of a choice for respondents between more and less environmentally friendly tree seedlings. In addition to this main outcome, survey-based measures for underlying behavioral drivers captured self-efficacy beliefs, intrinsic motivation, and perceived forest benefits. Overall, we found no indications that PES led to the crowding out of pro-environmental behavior. That is, respondents from the treatment villages were as likely as respondents from the control villages to choose environmentally friendly tree seedlings. We also found no systematic differences between these two groups in their underlying behavioral drivers, and nor did we find evidence for crowding effects when focusing on self-reported tree planting behavior as an alternative outcome measure.
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Registered trials
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