To reduce SDG tradeoffs in infrastructure provision, and to inform searches for SDG synergies, the authors show that roads’ impacts on Brazilian Amazon forests varied significantly across frontiers…

Spillovers can significantly reduce or enhance the net effects of land-use policies, yet there exists little rigorous evidence concerning their magnitudes. We examine how Costa Rica’s national parks…

Conservation programs have increased significantly, as has the evaluation of their impacts. However, the evaluation of their potential impacts beyond program borders has been scarce. Such spillovers…

When designing schemes such as conditional cash transfers or payments for ecosystem services, the choice of whom to select and whom to exclude is critical. We incentivize and measure actual…

The leading policy to conserve forest is protected areas (PAs). Yet, PAs are not a single tool: land users and uses vary by PA type; and public PA strategies vary in the extent of each type and in the…

We estimate the effects on deforestation that have resulted from policy interactions between parks and payments and between park buffers and payments in Costa Rica between 2000 and 2005. We show that…

Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than “paper parks” that are chronically short of the…

For Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, we find that protection types with differences in governance, including different constraints on local economic development, also differ in their locations. Taking…

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…