NORTH-SOUTH CENTRE - ETH - North-South Centre North-South ...

New policy mechanisms to mitigate
wildlife-livestock conflicts
Performance payments are a novel approach to provide
incentives for conservation. In this project, we investigate
performance payments as a policy tool to alleviate wildlife-livestock
conflicts. Often, such conflicts are especially
severe in tropical countries, which host many of the world’s
remaining endangered carnivores but, at the same time,
face high levels of rural poverty. In many cases, poor subsistence
farmers are hostile toward carnivore conservation
as these animals kill their livestock and, therefore, are a
threat to their livelihood. The performance payment approach
seeks to generate pro-conservation incentives by
offering in-kind or monetary payments to farmers based on
indicators of conservation outcomes. At a large scale, this
approach so far has only been implemented in Sweden,
where livestock herders receive payments based on the
number of carnivore offspring on their land.
In our project, we developed a framework of issues that
should be considered when planning a performance payment
scheme. Furthermore, we developed an outline for
a scheme that could be implemented at Bandhavgarh
National Park (BNP), a tiger reserve in India. The proposed
pilot scheme is based on a policy workshop co-organised
with Anil Gupta, an interview with the director of BNP, and
structured interviews with 305 households in 20 villages in
the buffer zone of BNP.
Furthermore, we investigated whether poorer village members
are more vulnerable to carnivore attacks than others.
Our data reveals that there are economies of scale in livestock
protection. Households with larger herds may spend
more effort in guarding their livestock and, thus, incur fewer
losses. Currently, the park authorities offer a compensation
for predation incidents. The data indicates a self-selection
process in which only households with higher per capita
income apply for compensation. Furthermore, households
that apply and receive compensation have higher per capita
incomes than those who apply but do not receive compensation.
Based on these findings we suggest that the scheme
bears room for improvement in its outreach to economically
weaker households. Initiatives to increase awareness of
the scheme and efforts to assure its transparency may be
especially useful for poorer households.
Project leader
Stefanie Engel
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Contact person
Astrid Zabel
Collaborators
Göran Bostedt, SLU, Sweden;
Anil Gupta, IIM, India;
Michael Kreuzer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland;
Robin Reid and Mohammed Said, ILRI, Kenya;
Pooja Sawhney,
Asian Development Bank, India;
Jeff Sayer, WWF International, Switzerland;
Thomas Sterner, HGU, Sweden
Duration
April 2007 – March 2010
Thematic cluster
Livestock and environment
Research collaboration
Livestock systems research
Male tiger in the Bandhavgarh National Park