In this guidebook, EfD Central America Director and Senior Research Fellow Francisco Alpizar together with Andrew Bovarnick provide a step-by-step introduction to Targeted Scenario Analysis (TSA), an…

We estimate the effect of hydro-meteorological emergencies on internal migration in Costa Rica between 1995 and 2000. Nationwide, we find that an increase of one emergency in a canton significantly…

Pro-environmental behavior is the willingness to cooperate and contribute to environmental public goods. A good understanding of why individuals undertake pro-environmental actions is important in…

This paper analyses the underlying factors affecting people’s satisfaction with drinking water provided by community-based organizations in rural Costa Rica. These organizations provide water to more…

Incentives conditioned on socially desired acts such as donating blood, departing conflict or mitigating climate change have increased in popularity. Many incentives are targeted, excluding some of…

A critical issue in the design of incentive mechanisms is the choice of whom to target. For forests, the leading schemes: [i] target locations with high ecosystem-service density; [ii] target…

This is a PhD dissertation by Anna Norden contains five papers: Paper 1: Incentives, Impacts, and Behavioural Issues in the Context of Payment for Ecosystem Services Programmes: Lessons for REDD+…

Ostrom proposed the underpinnings of a framework for the systematic study of the governance of complex social–ecological systems. Here we hypothesize that Ostrom’s social–ecological system framework…

We offer a nationwide analysis of the initial years of Costa Rica’s PSA program, which pioneered environmental-services payments and inspired similar initiatives. Our estimates of this program’s…

The expansion of a given land use may affect deforestation directly if forests are cleared to free land for this use, or indirectly, via the displacement of other land-use activities from non-forest…