Harnessing social norms to gain cost-effectiveness in conservation schemes through dynamic scheme design: implications of bounded rationality and other-regarding preferences for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are an incentive-based policy instrument encouraging landowners to adopt conservation practices that enhance ecosystem services in exchange for a compensation payment. PES schemes vary considerably in their design, yielding important implications for their conservation outcome and their cost-effectiveness. Given that a landowner’s probability of re-enrolling in a PES scheme is significantly influenced by social norms, this article explores whether the cost-effectiveness of PES schemes could be increased by leveraging on social norms. In particular, we explore whether designing dynamic PES schemes in which a homogenous PES payment is reduced in subsequent contracts would be more cost-effective than static schemes under the assumption that some landowners will enrol or re-enrol in the scheme encouraged by the behaviours of neighbouring landowners. We analyse whether, by initially setting a high payment so as to build a partially conserved landscape, it would be possible to leverage on social norms and reduce the PES payment without losing much conservation engagement. For this purpose, a conceptual agent-based simulation model entailing social norms and bounded rationality as well as other-regarding preferences has been developed.