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Abstract
The paper looks at the development of conservation policy since the
mid-20th Century. It reviews how land conservation policy developed in the UK,
and the ethical and policy design issues which emerged as the focus of
conservation expanded. It then considers how the lessons learned may be
applied to address environmental conservation needs in developing society
situations.
The first steps in UK conservation policy entailed legislation to
establish public rights over privately owned resources. Other legislation
recognized the public interest in the environmental values of the rural
environment. The next step was to offer payments to rural land owners and
operators not to change use. This assumed that land owners had a right to
determine the environmental standard on their land and created a problem of
asymmetric information. More positive policies followed to generate additional
public goods, raising issues of selection bias, and causing some erosion of
property rights as expected standards of environmental management were
raised. This led to an extensive literature on policy design to avoid these issues,
which will be briefly reviewed.
Voluntary conservation initiatives are increasingly being framed as
Payments for Environmental Services (PES). PES is heralded as an efficient
means to achieve conservation goals. This paper, illustrated with examples
from developing areas, addresses advantages and limitations of PES in terms of
land conservation policy and warns about limiting policy to utilizing strict PES
frameworks due to the complexity of conservation goals, reallocation of
property rights, trade-offs between efficiency and distributional issues,
uncertainties surrounding additionality of PES and the valuation of
conservation benefits and costs.