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An Empirical Evaluation of Private Landowner Participation in Voluntary Forest Conservation Programs

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Abstract

The use of voluntary programs targeting resource conservation on private land has become increasingly prevalent in environmental policy. Voluntary programs potentially offer significant benefits over regulatory and market-based approaches. This article examines the factors affecting landowner participation in voluntary forest conservation programs using a combination of parcel-level GIS and remotely sensed data and semi-structured interviews of landowners in Monroe County, Indiana. A logistic regression model is applied to determine the probability of participation based on landowner education, membership in other non-forest voluntary programs, dominant land use activity, parcel size, distance from urban center, land resource portfolios, and forest cover. Both land use activity and the spatial configuration of a landholder’s resource portfolio are found to be statistically significant with important implications for the design and implementation of voluntary programs.

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Notes

  1. Analysis of the total sample of 251 was used to describe policy participation and attitudes about current policy arrangements. Statistical analysis of factors influencing participation was reduced to 226 landowners due to missing and unreported values.

  2. As one reviewer correctly commented, there are other alternative measures of land use activity that may better measure intensity of land use. For example, agriculture could be represented as the percent of a parcel in cultivation and grazing. However, such measures are more difficult for forest land uses since the presence of the forest cover does not directly correspond to land use activities. In fact, in the study a forest grows on unmanaged vacant parcels and could just as easily be an indication of absence of any use. Since our interest is on individual’s perceived active uses we focus instead on those land use activities self-reported by landowners.

  3. Other alternative model specifications were also examined, principally a conditional logit model. Enrollment decisions were examined based on the conditionality of characteristics of the parcel and whether it met the minimum requirements for the majority of voluntary programs, and alternatively, based on if the landowner was involved in an activity deemed to increase the information available about the range of policies available. In neither specification did the conditional logit significantly improve on the normal logit model. While there are good theoretical and methodological justifications to prefer the conditional logit, there is a lack of established theoretical work to justify one model over another.

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the efforts of the Indiana project research group and all its various members, and the work of Cynthia Croissant, Glen Green, Laura Carlson and Tom Evans, in particular. Forest cover data was obtained from a classification done by Cynthia Croissant. Research on this project was conducted while the authors were in association with the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change (CIPEC) at Indiana University, Bloomington and the authors express their gratitude for that support. Thanks also to the landowners of Monroe County who gave their time and input, and to the National Science Foundation grant (SBR-9521918) that made this research possible. Finally, thank you to the three anonymous reviewers whose comments vastly improved the final article.

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Appendix: Survey Questions Utilized in This Study

Appendix: Survey Questions Utilized in This Study

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Kauneckis, D., York, A.M. An Empirical Evaluation of Private Landowner Participation in Voluntary Forest Conservation Programs. Environmental Management 44, 468–484 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-009-9327-3

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