Study about Evaluating Incentive Program Success: A Hill Land Class Fencing
Abstract:~ Incentive programs are often employed to encourage landholders to adopt practices that are desirable from a policy perspective. A commonly used measure of the success of these programs has been landholder utilisation of incentives. When utilisation declines it is important to ascertain if this is because the program has been successful and there are few potential participants remaining; or because there is still a large pool of potential participants but the program is failing to attract them. In this study we investigated the reasons for a decline in landholder utilisation of incentives for hill land class fencing (HLCF). Our results suggested that there were a number of on-farm characteristics that described the farms where HLCF was adopted. These included the proportion of property that was classified as steep hills, stock management practices, the affect of steep hill management on lowland areas of the farm and revegetation priorities.
Introduction:~ Incentive programs are often employed by government to encourage landholder behaviour to achieve public policy objectives (Pannell 2005; Cocklin et al. 2007; Pannell 2008). Incentive program success may be assessed, in part, through measuring utilisation of incentives by the target group (Stanely et al. 2005). Examples of this can be seen in King (2007), Pearson and Fletcher (2008) and Patterson-Majoor (2005). When utilisation of an incentive declines it is important, from a policy perspective, to ascertain if the decline is due to a high rate of eligible participants already utilising the incentive meaning there are few potential participants remaining; or because there is still a large pool of potential participants failing to be attracted, for whatever reason, to the incentive program. Determining which of these is the case will have profound implications for any policy decisions about future directions of an incentive program. Keep reading…
