Funding instruments for nature protection measures are often not adopted by private forest owners. But participation of forest owners is indispensable for reaching the policy goals which are pursued with these instruments. The acceptance of these instruments is influenced by forest owners’ but also by the instruments’ characteristics. As the latter can be formed by policy actors they are of special interest. The article identifies preference orders of German forest owners regarding characteristics of funding instruments for nature protection- related measures by applying a paired comparison approach (PC) to survey data. The aim of a PC is to order a set of objects according to their relative preference for the interviewees. In the present study, interviewees were asked to imagine a future funding instrument for ‘forest conversion’ respectively ‘maintenance of oldgrowth and habitat trees’ and to compare five attributes to each other. The attributes were: a shorter commitment period, a more flexible measure implementation, a higher amount of funding, a lower repayment risk and a lower administrative burden than today.
The analysis of the data followed two approaches. In the first approach a preference order was calculated for each of the two measures. For the measure ‘forest conversion’ the most preferred attribute is flexibility, followed by reduced paperwork and a higher amount of funding. For ‘maintenance of old-growth and habitat trees’ the most preferred attribute is a higher amount of funding, followed by more flexibility and reduced paperwork. Lower repayment risk and a shorter commitment period than today are at the end of the preference scale for both measures.
The second approach integrates subject specific variables. Therefore a model-based recursive partitioning approach is used which can be applied to identify groups of subjects that differ in their preference scale. The perception of risk within the current funding procedure has an influence on the preference order for both measures. A higher preference for a lower repayment risk is accompanied with a lower preference of a higher payment amount.
The presented results are not representative for all German forest owners. However, they can give orientation for policy about where to put more effort in terms of developing funding schemes, especially when combined with other studies. The relationship of perception of repayment risk and payment amount could be picked up, e.g., a two-staged incentive instrument, where a low-risk basic payment can be combined with a more risky resultoriented payment component.
