An important part of conservation practice is the empirical evaluation of program and policy impacts. Understanding why conservation programs succeed or fail is essential for designing cost-effective initiatives and for improving the livelihoods of natural resource users. The evidence we seek can be generated with modern impact evaluation designs. Such designs measure causal effects of specific interventions by comparing outcomes with the interventions to outcomes in credible counterfactual scenarios. Good designs also identify the conditions under which the causal effect arises. Despite a critical need for empirical evidence, conservation science has been slow to adopt these impact evaluation designs. We identify reasons for the slow rate of adoption and provide suggestions for mainstreaming impact evaluation in nature conservation.

Based on an in-depth field study in a rural area of Namibia, this article assesses the potential contribution of community-based tourism enterprises (CBTEs) to poverty alleviation and empowerment. It shows that tourism income captured locally improves rural households' livelihoods and generates linkages in the local economy. On the job learning, training sessions and extensive support by non-governmental organisations and donors are further shown to empower rural actors and unlock socioeconomic opportunities for the future. In this context, CBTEs can be characterised as pro-poor initiatives. However, this article provides counter evidence that the sustainability of such community tourism ventures is to be questioned. First, mainstreaming these projects within the competitive tourism commodity chain proves highly challenging and costly; second, communities' institutional and managerial capacity is weak and thus CBTEs' viability is limited; finally, inadequate support by donors and non-governmental organisations fails to tackle challenges faced by community tourism ventures.community-based tourism, livelihoods, institutional arrangements, global commodity chains,

Research on Payments for Environmental Services has only recently started to pay attention to motivation "crowding", i.e. the effect that such rewards might have on either strengthening (crowding-in) or weakening (crowding-out) participants' intrinsic motivations to protect and sustainably manage natural ecosystems. In this Introduction to the special issue Crowding-out or crowding-in? Behavioral and motivational responses to economic incentives for conservation, we propose a conceptual framework that maps out how PES implementation, or incentive-based conservation more broadly, might lead to motivation and behavioural change, drawing on theoretical insights and empirical evidence from behavioural economics and social psychology. We also explain how PES design and implementation factors, such as payment type, communication and verbal rewards, inclusive and participatory decision-making, and monitoring and sanctioning procedures, might harm or enhance intrinsic motivations. We suggest that motivation crowding depends on how these policy features are perceived by and affect an individual's need for satisfaction, modulated in turn by the stimulation or inhibition of competence, autonomy, social and environmental relatedness. We highlight the importance of measuring these variables and their motivation and behavioural outcomes in future PES research, in order to relate psychological processes with other contextual determinants of PES social-ecological performance.

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The PLOS ONE Collection “Measuring forest conservation effectiveness” brings together a series of studies that evaluate the effectiveness of tropical forest conservation policies and programs with the goal of measuring conservation success and associated co-benefits. This overview piece describes the geographic and methodological scope of these studies, as well as the policy instruments covered in the Collection as of June 2016. Focusing on forest cover change, we systematically compare the conservation effects estimated by the studies and discuss them in the light of previous findings in the literature. Nine studies estimated that annual conservation impacts on forest cover were below one percent, with two exceptions in Mexico and Indonesia. Differences in effect sizes are not only driven by the choice of conservation measures. One key lesson from the studies is the need to move beyond the current scientific focus of estimating average effects of undifferentiated conservation programs. The specific elements of the program design and the implementation context are equally important factors for understanding the effectiveness of conservation programs. Particularly critical will be a better understanding of the causal mechanisms through which conservation programs have impacts. To achieve this understanding we need advances in both theory and methods.