Beyond a market discourse: is framing a solution to avoid motivational crowding out in payments for ecosystem services?

The implementation of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) raises concerns about the effects of external economic incentives on intrinsic motivations. Their instrumental orientation could send an implicit signal that people have the right to degrade unless they get paid not to do so. Nevertheless, it has been suggested that features in the design and implementation of PES programs could help mediate motivational crowding if they are able to align PES goals with an individual’s intrinsic motivations. In this paper, we investigate whether the discourse used to communicate the policy, i.e. the framing of the policy, could be one mediating feature. We use a lab-in-the-field experiment with farmers in Colombia, to compare treatments with equivalent payment structures but differing in the framing used to communicate the PES policy. Acknowledging forest conservation as an achievement resulted in better conservation outcomes relative to a control framing. Emphasizing the cultural ecosystem services obtained from forests could also mitigate potential crowding-out effects associated with emphasizing only the targeted water services, although the results are not conclusive. Thus, our findings stress the importance of the framing used to communicate the PES policy, which could be a rather inexpensive tool to increase policy effectiveness and to mitigate the potential motivational crowding-out effects associated to the use of monetary incentives.