Food for thought - examining farmers' willingness to engage in conservation stewardship around a protected area in central India

Although protected areas (PAs) have long been considered a successful conservation strategy, more recent research has highlighted their ecological and sociological limitations. The extant PA network is constrained by land availability and exacerbates cultural, political, and social conflicts over access to resources. Consequently, the importance of private lands in playing a complementary role in conservation is being widely recognized. Voluntary conservation programs that encourage private landowners to adopt biodiversity-friendly agricultural practices have emerged worldwide. Landowners' willingness to participate in these programs is critical to attaining landscape-level biodiversity conservation. We adopted a multidisciplinary approach, combining economic theory of rational choice and social choice theory to explain decision making. Using a stated preference choice experiment method, we examined the role of program design and influence of demographic, economic, and socio-psychological variables on landowners' willingness to enroll in voluntary, incentive-based agroforestry programs. In 2018-2019, we surveyed 602 landowners in the buffer area of Pench Tiger Reserve, India. Landowners' willingness to engage in agroforestry depended on the amount of land to be enrolled, program duration, and incentive amount. Landowners' socio-economic characteristics, attitudes, self-efficacy, and social norms also influenced their willingness to participate. On average, landowners required Rs. 66,000 (ca. $940 USD) per acre per year to modify their land use and adopt agroforestry. Our study demonstrates that integrating voluntary agroforestry programs into India's rural development policy may allow biodiversity conservation to be balanced with agricultural productivity in buffer areas surrounding PAs. We call for a new approach that recognizes farmers as stakeholders in conservation and in creating resilient landscapes that support biodiversity and preserve livelihoods.