This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The presence of social, economic, and environmental considerations in decision making for international development point to the inevitability of some difficult tradeoffs; the need to give up something valued in order to gain something else that is also valued but for different reasons. This research seeks to better understand and improve the effectiveness of two approaches that may be applied in sequence to address environment-development tradeoffs. These are (1) stated choice approaches to inform the design and implementation of (2) payment for environmental service (PES) programs. In considering stated choice approaches and PES programs together, our research is focused primarily on decisions that must be made and, hence, tradeoffs that must be addressed on three levels. First, policy makers must confront tradeoffs to establish whether an ecosystem should be protected or developed, and if PES programs should be applied. Second, policy makers must elicit information from stakeholders, using stated choice or related approaches, regarding acceptable tradeoffs across environmental and development objectives. Finally, service providers must confront tradeoffs when deciding if they will accept or reject the terms of the PES contract that is offered to them.
When we consider this sequence of methods and decisions, three separate challenges must be addressed. First, policy makers must ensure that the required tradeoffs are sensible and relevant to those being asked to consider them. Second, policy makers must work to ensure that the costs and benefits that might result from management decisions are characterized completely and distributed equitably. And third, appropriate and timely decision support must be designed and delivered to help people deal with judgmental inconsistencies when they are asked to consider complex and demanding?emotionally and cognitively?tradeoffs. Whereas research has been carried out in industrialized nations on how best to elicit, characterize, and structure stakeholder objectives and then use these objectives to develop and evaluate management alternatives, little work has been done in developing countries where an established tradition of deliberative and participatory decision making is largely absent. The fundamental objective of this research is, therefore, to better understand and improve the quality of decision-making processes in international development settings that increasingly must account for multiple stakeholders, conflicting objectives, and tradeoffs across development and environmental objectives. The work involves cases studies and experiments with stated-choice surveys, enhanced by immersion methods, for PES in Costa Rica.
