Tapping more trees less often or fewer trees more often? Evaluating choices for forest resources governance

An important aspect in the management of forests is how the resources should be used. Governance structures put in place for forest management need to reflect resource users' divergent preferences, rules governing resource use to mirror local conditions, and the need for collective choice arrangements to ensure users' participation in appropriation and provision rules. These mechanisms could promote coordination as well as cooperation, and influence preference for resource management and extraction behavior. In this study, we consider forest governance structures that mimic these core issues and examine whether resource users choose to extract more tree resources less often or fewer tree resources more often. Based on a choice experiment on forest resource users involving mainly farmers and youth, a mixed logit model was used to explore preferences and estimate willingness to accept. Findings show that users are willing to switch to forest management regimes that delay resource extraction by allowing more resting periods for trees to rehabilitate. Moreover, results related to our time preference measure imply that users with a lower discount rate are likely to prefer governance structures that increase the resting period. On the contrary, users have negative preferences for resting higher proportion of trees. Instead, they prefer to tap more trees and are willing to pay for it. Overall, results highlight resource users' strong preferences for forest governance structures that allow resource extraction from more trees but less often.