Min Liu (Lanzhou University): “Communication, reward, and punishment in grassland management: experimental evidence from herders."

Abstract:
Grassland degradation and poverty are the worldwide and prominent problems in pastoral areas. We conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment in the pastoral area of China to estimate the impacts of different management strategies on livestock production, grassland conservation, and household livelihoods. We design several experimental interventions including internal communication, reward, and punishment to identify effective methods for balancing economic production and ecological preservation. The empirical results reveal that internal communication is the most efficient strategy to conduct low-intensity grazing and achieve grassland conservation, which is followed by publishment, and reward is the least. While reward is the most effective way for enhancing total household income, communication is more effective to improve livestock income than reward and publishment. Mechanism analyses show that internal communication impacts low-grazing decision and trust positively and significantly at group level, and decrease egoism and increases collectivism in herders’ individual grazing decisions. In addition, we find that herders self-declarations impact their grazing decisions and the trust to others significantly, compared with appealing their opinions to peers or to the society. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the different interventions have different effects with the differences in grassland area, household income, and social networks of herders. This study contributes empirical evidence supporting the superiority of internal communication over reward and punishment strategies for achieving sustainable grassland management.