Coordinating Farms in Collective Agri-Environmental Schemes: the Role of Conditional Incentives

This paper analyses data from a novel collective agri-environmental scheme (cAES) in Alsace, France, designed to protect the local European hamster population by motivating farmers to engage in habitat conservation measures. In contrast to typical conservation contracts that pay individual farmers based on their own performance, the cAES studied here pays farmers only when the percentage of land conserved by all farmers within a collective zone reaches a critical threshold. We find that the likelihood of participation is higher for farmers with a relatively large agricultural surface within the collective zone, increases with the number of farmers in a collective zone, and increases over time. Those with more land in the collective zone allocate more acreage to conservation. We define different contributor types and provide insight into the possible motives underlying contributions to collective conservation schemes.