Decision-Making Analyses of Farmers in Rural China Regarding Forestry Under Different Contexts of Risk: Investment, Cooperation, and Provision of Public Goods

Forest farmers in rural communities in China play crucial roles in both livelihood improvement and ecological conservation. The government recognizes their importance and has implemented various measures to regulate and guide their behaviors. In this thesis, I attempt to analyze the decision-making of farmers in rural China under different contexts of risks considering their decisions are threatened by multiple risks or uncertainties. This thesis takes forest sectors as typical examples and tries to focus on the forest-related decisions of farmers. It mainly includes three parts, derived from three academic articles. In the first part, I investigate the role of risk perception in farmers’ decisions on forest investment under the protected areas policy and explore the path through which the policy has an impact on forest revenue. The results show that the protected areas policy could increase farmers’ revenue from forests through the channel where their risk perceptions are raised and consequently forest environmentally friendly investments are enhanced. In the second part, I examine whether the experiences of climate disasters make farmers more willing to cooperate and the mechanism behind this impact. I find that climate disasters, especially drought, motivate farmers to cooperate despite their negative indirect impact on cooperation through social capital. In the last section, I construct a theoretical framework to explain farmers’ provision of public goods with framed risks using reciprocity and anxiety as two belief-dependent motives and verify the hypotheses using data from a framed field experiment. I discover that farmers’ decisions to provide public goods are dependent on their beliefs in others, and their incentives to contribute in public good games have been undermined when risk in the public account arises. The thesis has implications for policymakers seeking to understand and influence farmers’ decisions associated with forest-related investment, cooperation, or public good provision faced with risks.

Department dc:contributor.department

Forestry

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Dai, Zhe

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kant, Shashi

• Decision-making
• Protected area
• Public good game
• Risk

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/149829

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/149829