Conservation Agreements: Relational Contracts with Endogenous Monitoring

This article examines the structure and performance of conservation agreements, which are relational contracts used across the world to protect natural resources. Key elements of these agreements are (1) they are ongoing arrangements between a local community and an outside party, typically a non-governmental organization (NGO); (2) they feature payments in exchange for conservation services; (3) the prospects for success depend on the NGO engaging in costly monitoring to detect whether the community is foregoing short-term gains to protect the resource; (4) lacking a strong external enforcement system, they rely on self-enforcement; and (5) the parties have the opportunity to renegotiate at any time. A repeated-game model is developed and utilized to organize an evaluation of real conservation agreements, using three case studies as representative examples.