The purpose of this paper is to elicit social preferences for various organizational and managerial changes in the landscape of the agricultural area called “Ancien Marais des Baux”, at the foothill of the Alpilles Mountain, in Provence. We present preliminaries results from a pilot survey conducted in the area in the winter of 2008. In our research, the environmental resource is the landscape, defined in terms of its attributes and levels these attributes would take with and without various management options. We use the Choice Experiment to determine what the preferred landscape is, and under wetland restoration, the most desired features that the wetland should provide. The random parameter logit model is employed to take into account variances in unobserved preference heterogeneity. Consistent with expectations, we observed that respondents who are neither green, have little attachment to wetlands, have poor understanding of wetland services, are WTP less ceteris paribus for all the attributes in question, compared to the respondents that have green behaviour, knows about wetlands or cares about their existence in Marais des Baux. Not surprisingly, the respondents considering the wetland in Marais des Baux, part of their cultural heritage, wants to visit it in the future, and preserve it for future generations, have the greatest WTP for any combination of attributes. We also observed the importance of mosquito control in any support of wetland restoration among respondents. Indeed, restoration on an advanced scale is only accepted in the presence of biological mosquito control. Distinct landscape features, such as tree hedges which still allows for the view of the massif of the Alpilles are valued equally high as the recreational opportunites related to the wetland. Biodiversity is low on the priority list compared to other attributes, but still positively valued.
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Paper provided by LAMETA, Universtiy of Montpellier in its series Working Papers with number
08-12.
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