Behavioral incentives for land transformation on natural grasslands

About

Africa's communal rangelands face significant degradation, driven by expanding settlements, land tenure policies, climate change, pervasive wildfires, and unmanaged grazing. This degradation leads to the loss of biodiversity and wildlife, erodes the resilience of communities to extreme weather events, limits agricultural-based livelihoods, and undermines water security and provisioning. Organizations across Africa are employing the ethos of the Herding4Health (H4H) model, which addresses these challenges by supporting community-driven, sustainable rangeland stewardship. Meat Naturally undertakes a similar approach by restoring rangelands and conserving biodiversity while improving livelihoods through capacity building and community governance structures. Meat Naturally is scaling rapidly, with new initiatives exploring access to carbon and nature finance as well as sustainable supply-chain meat markets. 

However, current evidence suggests that H4H impacts could be highly context-dependent, and may be modest. Furthermore, improvements in community resource management have not clearly translated into detectable short-term well-being benefits or significant improvements in rangeland health. We see a unique opportunity to experiment with payments for ecosystem services (PES) designs by testing behavioral, social, and ecological responses to tailored individual and collective incentives using a randomized controlled trial (RCT).

The project will align with Conservation South Africa and the Africa Field Division’s broader strategy, contributing to the Roadmap for Enabling Just Transformations for Africa’s People and Nature (“Africa Roadmap”) as well as the Meat Naturally and H4H rangeland restoration scaling efforts. The results may better help position these programs to attract future carbon and biodiversity finance from voluntary carbon markets.

Approach

To design a successful RCT, we are undertaking a co-designed research agenda with Meat Naturally and Conservation South Africa to develop a theory of change and ensure we have the data necessary to measure outcomes. This foundation setting research includes:

• Running a quasi-experimental impact evaluation using remote sensing and data from Meat Naturally to ultimately deliver new remote sensing datasets to track outcomes at project scale.
• Building an actionable framework to assess and deliver well-being outcomes.
• Collecting preliminary data to test promising causal mechanisms that could amplify the social and environmental outcomes of H4H, and produce the datasets needed for this research. 

We will then co-develop an RCT that compares the current Meat Naturally model (business-as-usual intervention notably promoting rotational rangeland rest in the stewardship plan) with an experimental co-designed intervention that layers additional payments and technical assistance to promote the adoption of full rotational grazing techniques. By testing various payment designs—e.g., whether payments are split between communities and individuals, and whether payments are unconditional, conditional on participation or compliance, or conditional on environmental outcomes—we are aiming to create a cost-effective incentive structure with robustly measurable impacts.

Partners

This project is in collaboration with Conservation International (CI) and Conservation South Africa (CSA) as part of the Arnhold UC Santa Barbara-Conservation International Climate Solutions Collaborative. UCSB and CI launched this initiative through generous support from John Arnold (UCSB '75) to unify their demonstrated expertise and networks to conduct cutting-edge applied research to yield tangible, progressive solutions and propel the careers of emerging environmental professionals. We are also partnering with Meat Naturally, a for profit enterprise dedicated to rangeland restoration in South Africa.