Policy Instruments and Incentives for Coordinated Habitat Conservation

Nearly half of imperiled species (IS) listed under the US Endangered Species Act have most of their habitat on private land. Management of IS therefore relies on engaging private landowners in conservation to avoid listing and the accompanying land use restrictions. Two types of voluntary policy instruments are used to incentivize conservation on private lands: subsidies and voluntary conservation agreements with assurances (VCAAs), under which landowners implement conservation practices in return for assurance that no land use restrictions will be imposed if the practices are maintained. No prior work compares landowners’ incentives for strategic behavior under these instruments. This is important because habitat quality is influenced by landscape size, connectivity, and composition. The probability that an IS becomes listed—and the economic risks facing landowners—depends endogenously on management decisions by multiple landowners. We use theoretical and experimental approaches to compare conservation effort, spatial allocation of this effort, and cost-effectiveness of species protection under each instrument when species protection requires spatially-contiguous coordination. We find that VCAAs with land use restrictions are no more effective than land use restrictions with or without subsidies in coordinating conservation effort, and they do not result in greater species protection. Land use restrictions—either alone or coupled with subsidies—improve coordination.