Compensating losses versus creating gains: implications for biodiversity offsets and agri-environmental contracts

In the economic literature on themotivations underlying voluntary contributions to environmental public goods, many studies describe the drivers of pro-environmental behaviour but relatively little attention is granted to the way the overall objective of the environmental program is framed. A program which contributes to an increase of environmental quality can be perceived differently from a program designed to bring back the environmental quality to its original level, after it was damaged by human intervention. How does it impact participation rates and contribution levels? This paper addresses this issue in the context of agri-environmental contracts for biodiversity conservation. It compares farmers' willingness to participate in two equivalent agri-environmental schemes, one being framed as part of a biodiversity offset program, the other one as a biodiversity conservation program. We demonstrate with a discrete choice experiment run with farmers located in the South-East of France that biodiversity-offsets programs must offer a greater payment to enroll farmers compared to the latter. This is explained by behavioural factors such as warmglow, green guilt, and loss aversion.