Rooted in Community: Understanding Meghalaya’s Green Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) Program

Meghalaya was just as beautiful as my Indian friends had told me. But on my trip there this June, I encountered far less rain than I expected for the lush, hilly Northeast Indian state those friends had described as “the wettest place on Earth.”

I was accompanying a two-person research team from Inclusion Economics India Centre (IEIC), the Indian affiliate of Yale Inclusion Economics (YIE). Their job was to analyze the impact of a  statewide government anti-deforestation program. My job as a YIE summer intern was to write about IEIC’s work (hence this article). For two days I trekked through the Garo Hills, Meghalaya’s westernmost region, with the project’s IEIC research manager and a YIE-affiliated PhD candidate from the Yale School of the Environment

The program the research team was supporting, GREEN Meghalaya PES, paid villagers across the state to commit to preserving their private forested land for 30 years. By amassing these commitments, the Meghalaya authorities hoped to stem deforestation; forests cover three quarters of Meghalaya, but the state has lost over a tenth of its primary forest and tree cover since 2000. In a number of villages in the Garo Hills, though, participation in the PES program remained limited. By going to some of these places, the team aimed to find out why.

The villages we traveled to sat at the ends of bouncing dirt roads extending from the highways that slice through the Garo Hills. Everything was green, and most of the time it was difficult to see over the treetops. Some of the villages were uphill. Some, thankfully, were downhill. Chickens, kittens, and puppies darted out from under wooden homes with satellite dishes. But the villages’ most important residents were the people we had come to interview.

The Garo people depend on the forests for their livelihoods and, in fact, their way of life. The Garo use the timber to build houses and churches, even to construct coffins for their departed. The forests provide both temporal and spiritual support, from fruit trees that feed the communities to sacred groves that pay homage to local deities. The trees also anchor the water supply villagers rely on, all the more important as droughts come more often.

But as the economic pressure on the people of Meghalaya has grown, so has the strain on the forests. According to the Indian government think tank NITI Aayog, the state’s per capita income is a third less than the national average. Meanwhile, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, a United Nations Development Program instrument for measuring health, education, and standard of living, indicates that Meghalaya has the highest share of “multidimensionally poor” of the Northeastern states, at 27.79 percent of the population.

Across the state, these financial realities have left villagers little choice but to convert many forests to farmland, whether through slash-and-burn agriculture of their own or by selling the land to commercial interests. Between 1990 and 2015, farmland expanded from 11.6 percent of Meghalaya’s total area to 15.3 percent.

We needed to understand the barriers to PES participation in some villages. In each village, we  sat down with the headman (the senior-most figure) and other community leaders. We tended to convene at the outdoor community hall or outside the headman’s house, where a dozen of the headman’s constituents and their children would gather to observe the exchange. Before and after each meeting, every attendee from the village—including the spectators—would line up to shake our hands.

As for the meetings themselves, they made for fascinating conversation. The villagers told us of the history of deforestation in the region, their uses for the trees, and their thoughts on PES and similar government programs. They outlined PES’s strengths and weaknesses.

The reasons we heard for the dearth of signups in these villages varied and sometimes contradicted each other. Some villagers thought the contract duration was too long, others too short. Many villagers inquired about their obligations under the contracts. Some communities had a better understanding of the program than others, with questions about the payment scheme and how they could use their land. In one case, villagers had signed up for the program the previous week—the PES database just hadn’t been updated with their information yet.

It was up to my IEIC colleagues to integrate these findings into their evaluation. Through statistical analysis, the team is determining whether PES fulfills a concept known as additionality: if villagers didn’t enroll their forests in the program, would those forests become farmland? Or is the state government paying villagers to preserve forests the villagers had no plans to cut down in the first place?

In other words, is the program making a difference?

Qualitative fieldwork underpins this quantitative research. IEIC’s determination of PES’s success will draw on lengthy randomized control trials and regression analysis. In the meantime, the context for the study’s conclusions will come from the conversations we had at the edge of Meghalaya.

Inclusion Economics doesn’t exist to solve abstract mathematical problems. Economists employ rigorous qualitative and quantitative research to evaluate policies and tailor them to the people they’re meant to serve. The ultimate beneficiaries of this work will be the people of the Garo Hills. They reap the environmental and economic benefits of curbing deforestation, a dividend their government is working to help them obtain.

Effective policy research demands that we meet people where they are. As economists parse regressions back in Delhi and New Haven, the real measure of success won’t derive from statistical significance alone. It will rest on whether the Garo Hills remain as green as they were that June, and whether in the decades to come the Garo can continue to depend on the forests that have sustained them for generations.

The answers to those questions begin in the field