As an example, Colombia recently launched the Visión Amazonía project, which will invest US$ 200 million (50% donated by international donors) until 2020 to halt deforestation processes completely. This project will be based on direct payments to landholders, and complemented by the BIOREDD+ program in Colombia, which aims to invest an additional US$ 27,8 million to promote sustainable livelihoods compatible with forest conservation.

Subjective insecurity is a key determinant of different forms of prosocial behavior. In Study 1, we used field experiments with farmers in Colombian villages exposed to different levels of violence to investigate how individual perceptions of insecurity affect cooperation, trust, reciprocity and altruism. To do so, we developed a cognitive-affective measure of subjective insecurity. We found that subjective insecurity has a negative effect on cooperation but influences trust and altruism positively. In Study 2, carried out three years after Study 1, we repeated the initial design with additional measures of victimization. Our goal was to relate subjective insecurity with actual victimization. The findings of Study 2 support the initial results, and are robust and consistent for cooperative behavior and trust when including victimization as a mediator. Different indicators of victimization are positively correlated with subjective insecurity and an aggregate index of victimization has a negative effect on cooperation but exerts a positive influence on trust.

Most of the literature on the causes of tropical deforestation has focused on the proximate and distal causes. However, research exploring the psychological drivers of deforestation, i.e., motivations, is still scant despite being crucial to understand the processes of land-use change and individual decision making within social-ecological systems. We studied the combined effect of structural and individual causes of deforestation, with particular emphasis on motivations, for a sample of rural households in Colombia's foremost tropical deforestation frontier. We implemented a new instrument based on self-determination theory to measure five different types of motivations to protect the forests: intrinsic, guilt/regret, social, extrinsic motivations, and amotivation (lack of motivation). Our findings show that, controlling for the structural and household drivers widely identified in the deforestation literature, intrinsic motivations positively correlate with less self-reported deforestation. Also, amotivated people and those with extrinsic motives, such as expected payments for conservation, are more likely to deforest. Our results show that motivations can explain variation in land-use decisions and thus should be considered when designing, implementing, and evaluating conservation policies aiming to halt deforestation.Ecology and Society 24(1): 4 https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol24/iss1/art4/

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