So really, what am I doing here?

I realized recently that I haven't really written about what I'm doing in Bolivia. I wrote a little about Payments for Environmental Services, which is related to my work, and I think I've mentioned the fact that I'm doing something with surveys, but maybe you want to know why I'm here. If not, skip this post, I'll write about my Marc Anthony concert experience next time.

A big problem in conservation work, and development work in general, is that NGOs or USAID or whoever comes into communities and dumps money into projects that are supposed to help people. Maybe they do help people, but maybe they don't, and it's hard for us to know - even if we do some kind of before and after data collection, there are a million things that could be affecting how things are going in the community other than the development project we're trying to evaluate. So how do we know if what we're doing is worthwhile at all?

The project I'm working on is trying to answer that question. Fundación Natura has a new integrated management area that they are going to start working in, and we are designing a big field experiment to evaluate the effects of the kind of work Natura does. There are about 140 communities in the area - some will get a PES project, some will just get payments (to control for the fact that PES is increasing people's incomes, so we can see the difference between those getting money that is contingent on conservation behavior and those that are just getting money with no strings attached), some will get environmental education, some will get a combination of payments and education, and some will get nothing, as a control to see what would happen in the absence of Natura's projects.

My job is to work on what it is that we want to evaluate in these communities. The obvious thing is the environmental indicators - do the communities with Natura's projects have more forest area in conservation, or cleaner water downstream? But we're working on the social and economic piece - how do these projects affect people's behavior, social norms and views towards the environment? Maybe people will conserve more because the projects make people value the environment more, or maybe they will conserve more just because they're receiving money to do so, or maybe people will value the environment more but not change their behavior. What is the effect of Natura essentially putting a price on environmental services? Will it make people value the environment more, or does putting a price tag on the forest turn it into a commodity with no intrinsic value?

I'm working on this survey with another intern, and I'm looking specifically at the social norms and values part of the evaluation, while she's looking more at socioeconomic indicators and behavior. And it turns out that measuring things like how much someone cares about the environment is really hard. These things would be hard to measure in a community of people just like me who spoke my language - it's a thousand times harder in a different culture and a different language. Hence the focus groups and the pilot testing.