Kwaw S. Andam International Food Policy Research Institute

1. What are the Effects of Land Use Restrictions on Local Communities? Evidence from an Impact Evaluation of Costa Rica’s Protected Areas Kwaw S. Andam International Food Policy Research Institute Perspectives on Impact Evaluation: Approaches to Assessing Development Effectiveness 31 March - 2 April 2009, Cairo, Egypt

2. Acknowledgements • Co-authors: Paul Ferraro (Georgia State Univ.) and Margaret Holland (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison) • Evaluation Office, Global Environment Facility (GEF)

3. Research Question • How different would socioeconomic outcomes have been in the absence of protected areas?

4. Policy Context • Protected Areas: • Most widely used conservation tool • More planned for future • Role in climate change policy?

5. Motivation • Strong debate: how do protected areas affect local people? • Most studies focus on environmental impacts only

6. The Evaluation Challenge • Protected Areas placed selectively • Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005): • “Many protected areas were specifically chosen • because they were not suitable for human use.” • Empirical evidence: e.g. Costa Rica (Powell 2000; Sanchez-Azofeifa); Nepal (Hunter & Yonzon 1993) ; Australia (Pressey 1995) ; United States (Scott et al. 2001) ; • Selection bias • Lack of common support

7. Therefore, an evaluation must… • Objectively measure indicators of human welfare Measure indicators before and after establishment of protected area Measure indicators in both “treated” and “control” areas Measure baseline characteristics that affect both location of protected areas and how indicators change over time

8. Study site – Costa Rica

9. Costa Rica’s Protected Areas

10. Approach Estimate impact of protected areas established before 1980 on changes in census tract-level socioeconomic indicators between 1973 and 2000

11. Key question How different would socioeconomic outcomes have been in the absence of protected areas?

12. Data • Quantitative indicators of change in socioeconomic outcomes (infrastructure, assets, poverty indices) • Measures near time of and after establishment of protected areas • Control variables including land use productivity, forest cover (1960), accessibility (distance to markets, ‘road-less volume’), baseline (1973) indicator

13. Matching Methods • Select control communities similar to communities near protected areas (treated) in terms of pre-protection characteristics • Treatment: at least 20% protected before 1980 • Key assumption: without protection (and conditional on control variables), control and treated communities would, on average, have similar socioeconomic outcomes in 2000 • >>> any remaining differences in outcomes are due to protection

15. Results

16. Additional Results

17. Caveats • Average effects only (adverse effects on subgroups may still be present) • Costa Rica may be very different from other nations • Indicators may not capture other aspects of poverty

18. Ongoing work (1) • Census segments change over time from 1973 to 2000 • Need to account for changes in unit of analysis over time

19. 1973: 4,694 segments

20. 2000: 17,264 segments

21. Ongoing work (1) • Use simple areal weighting to reconcile 1973 segments with disaggregated segments in 2000, and analyze at level of 1973 segments • Findings confirm analysis with disaggregated segments

22. Ongoing work (2) • Spillover effects: do effects of protection spillover onto nearby ‘unprotected’ communities? • Findings: None to small positive spillover effects

23. Ongoing work (3) • Test sensitivity of results to hidden bias (unobservable characteristics that affect likelihood of protection and socioeconomic outcomes) • Test using Rosenbaum bounds tests • So far, mixed results

24. Summary • No evidence that protected areas had negative effects • Protected areas may have had positive effects • But conventional methods (erroneously) imply the opposite

25. Discussion • Why differences in estimates? • Simply comparing post-protection outcomes does not account for pre-existing differences correlated with poverty indicators • How does protection have positive effects? • Ecotourism • Protected area infrastructure • Initiatives to ease deforestation pressures • Ecosystem services?

26. Thank you! Kwaw S. Andam International Food Policy Research Institute Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Email: k.andam@cgiar.org Phone: ++251.617.2507 www.ifpri.org

27. Appendix • More comparisons with conventional estimates

28. Replicating conventional methods