direct compensation for conservation services can buttress forest frontiers
against expansion of cultivated areas and strengthen incentives to adopt envi-
ronmentally compatible resource use in production areas.
Conservation concession is an effort to arrive at a mutually agreeable level
of habitat protection by offering appropriate compensation. Ideally, then, such
arrangements are self-enforcing; should any of the parties to the agreement fail
to comply with the terms of the concession, payments cease, so the challenge
is to design compensation schemes that provide all parties with a vested inter-
est in compliance. Nevertheless, an emphasis on monitoring and enforcement
must be maintained to verify and ensure compliance with the agreement,
often necessitating capacity building. Given that alternative employment for
local stakeholders often is essential to concession acceptability and success,
capacity building can take the form of employing stakeholders as monitoring
and enforcement agents, thus achieving multiple aims.
Another concern relates to the potential danger of simply displacing pres-
sure from one habitat area to another. For example, a farmer participating in
a conservation concession arrangement may invest resources freed by the
inability to clear a particular area (and the compensation for doing so) in clear-
ing another area that falls outside the agreement. However, with respect to
retirement and set-asides of productive plots, application of the conservation
concession approach in the first instance will target areas with a low opportu-
nity cost of conservation, that is, areas with weak prospects for cultivation. In
the Colombian scenario, payments offer farmers a way out of a desperate sit-
uation; conservation concessions in this context provide an exit option, not a
supplement to ongoing activities. The poor economic performance of coffee is
precisely what makes retirement through the conservation concession
approach an attractive strategy to both conservationists and farmers.
The question of displacement might seem pertinent if farming could be
redirected to entirely different parts of the country that offer more promising
prospects for the same or a different crop. However, areas with a high oppor-
tunity cost of conservation, implying high profit potential from conversion,
are under threat regardless of whether conservation concessions are applied
elsewhere. Moreover, this dynamic is not unique to conservation concessions;
any effort to protect habitat, by definition, implies that activities that might
have taken place in the target area might now take place elsewhere. Only
detailed stakeholder analysis can determine whether beneficiaries of a retire-
ment program through conservation concessions are likely to seek alternative
rural employment in the area, establish new plots elsewhere, migrate to urban
areas, or pursue other possibilities. However, one strength of the conservation
concession approach is the explicit attention to alternative employment
opportunities as an investment target. As an integral component of the mech-
anism, such opportunities form part of the compensation for conservation
146 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry