Abstract
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), mainly designed for local farmer groups, have been practiced since 2011 in Japan. The main purpose of this PES is to compensate farmers' implementation of environmental-friendly agriculture. However, it is still problem that most of farmers do not participate the PES scheme despite of monetary incentive. The aims of this study are to test whether it has spatial autocorrelation and to reveal farmer's adoption factors using data from Shiga prefecture, Japan. Therefore spatial econometric approaches are applied. Results indicate that (1) positive spatial autocorrelation is important factors to join the PES for farmers, (2) some geographical position including the distance from Biwako-lake has an influence on farmers' adoption and (3) some conditions of farmer groups (e.g. diversity in age, large farmer ratio and social capital) has a crucial role in participating PES. These results suggest that targeting in incentivize strategies, formation of social capital, and increasing the number of large farmer can contribute significantly to motivate farmer group to participate PES. Incentivizing scheme in PES should be more flexible and tailor-made one.
