Beyond money: motivating farmers’ responsibility awareness for ecological protection based on the bystander effect in Southwest China

Achieving sustainable and long-lasting ecological conservation incentives necessitates incorporating the intrinsic motivations of farmers into policy design frameworks. Currently, existing payments for ecosystem services (PES) projects overly focus on monetary incentives, particularly in Chinese projects that primarily revolve around payment standards and place little emphasis on payment design. In this study, a multi-factor mixed field experiment was conducted in Napo County, Southwest China, based on the three dimensions of the bystander effect: diffusion of responsibility (population size), evaluation apprehension (disclosure or non-disclosure), and pluralistic ignorance (emergency level). The key factors that motivate farmers’ sense of responsibility for ecological protection were analysed, showing that: (1) a high emergency level plays a significant role in stimulating farmers’ awareness for ecological protection; (2) the influence of disclosure is significant in smaller areas but weakens with increasing area; (3) faced with the long-term, collective responsibility event of ecological protection, population size does not trigger the bystander effect in ecological protection; (4) most interestingly, patriotism has extreme application potential in ecological protection. This study explores the non-economic factors that encourage ecological stewardship among farmers and applies new approaches to field experiments in payments for ecosystem services, with a specific focus on developing countries.