Designing Conservation-Incentives for Tanzania’s Ecological Corridors: Cost-effectiveness and Behavioral Determinants

This dataset contains observations from the lab-in-the field experiment or game and post-experiment survey. The aim of the study was to design and assess the conservation effectiveness of different modalities of payment for ecosystem services (PES) under equal and unequal land distribution. The study further explores the influence of personal values (Biospheric and Egoistic) in shaping the performance of PES. The experiment was conducted in rural villages within two ecological corridors of Tanzania namely Igando-Igawa (IIWC) and Baga-Kisimagonja (BKG). Specifically, the experiment was implemented in a group of four local farmers (we call them players). One group was assigned to a treatment (i.e. treatment group) and another not (i.e. control group). A group can either in equal (i.e., all small farmers, each endowed with two parcels of experimental farmland) or unequal (i.e., small and large farmers, each large farmer endowed with four parcels of experimental farmland) settings. The treatment was introduced in a sequence of three consecutive rounds of the game that are; conservation sensitization as a baseline (T0), followed by fixed payment (T1) and fixed payment with agglomeration bonus (T2). Farmers in control group consistently repeated the baseline. In all the three rounds, farmer had to make a decision on whether to retire the experimental farmland for conservation or keep farming. Every decision had a payoff framed in Tanzania shillings. The environmental payoff resulted from a conservation decision constituted the outcome of interest. The variable of interest is PES which includes T1 and T2. The other variable of interest are personal values collected from a survey. Other variables are experimental elements such as whether a farmer is in the treatment or control group, equal or unequal sub-group, small or large farmer, number of experimental rounds and day of the experiment. Other identification variables such as individual ID and number of the player in the experiment are listed. Socio-economic and demographic characteristics (age, gender, education, household income, family size and total farmland owned by household) are included as a control variable. This is in addition to trust, real-world variation in decision-making power over land and social and environmental relatedness.