1. Introduction
As the world’s most populous and largest developing country, China has played an important role in global poverty reduction, making tremendous contributions in this regard. According to the 2019 White Paper on “China’s Food Security” by the Information Office of the State Council, according to the World Bank’s international poverty standard of
$1.90 USD/person/day, China’s rate of contribution to global poverty reduction exceeds 70%. China is the first country globally to achieve the poverty reduction goal of the UN Millennium Development Goals. Since China has a strict urban and rural household registration management system, it has adopted an unbalanced public service policy. Urban residents have more comprehensive social security services than rural residents. Therefore, according to the current poverty standards in China, all poor people live in rural areas. According to the poverty standard of
$327.72 USD/person/year (constant prices in 2010), the rural population in poverty at the end of 2019 was 5.15 million (distribution: 3.23 million in western China, 1.81 million in central China, and 470,000 in eastern China). Compared to the end of the previous year, there was a decrease of 11.09 million people, and the incidence of poverty was 0.6% (see
Appendix A 1.1); compared with 770 million people at the end of 1978 (see
Appendix A 1.2), this decrease constitutes a cumulative reduction of nearly 765 million people.
China’s large-scale poverty reduction is inseparable from the material basis provided by economic growth [
1]. It is also inseparable from the enforcement of poverty reduction policies based on local and individual conditions. The policy of EFRs for the poor (hereafter referred to as the policy of ecological forest rangers for the poor (PEFRP)) is a concrete manifestation of the poverty reduction policy of “tailor measures to local conditions and people.” In China, ecologically fragile areas, ecological function areas, forestry resource-gathering areas, ethnic minority settlements, and areas where the poor population are distributed have a high degree of geographical overlap (see
Appendix A 1.3) [
2,
3,
4]. Therefore, the use of ecological compensation policies to conduct poverty reduction activities has become a concrete manifestation of the realization of “tailor measures to local conditions and people,” and this measure is conducive not only to its versatility in environmental protection and poverty reduction but also to its sustainability. The PEFRP is an important part of the practice of ecological poverty reduction policies (EPRP). It is also a forest protection system designed to combine regional resource endowments and population resource endowments. The PEFRP means that after the central and provincial governments have issued project funds and allocation indicators, the county and township governments and village cadres are responsible for organizing the enforcement, and one or two ecological forest rangers from poor households in poor villages are hired in order to manage and protect local forests, wetlands, desertified land, and other resources. During this period, the township forestry department directly or entrusts village cadres to evaluate the performance of EFRs of poor households and pay no more than
$1424.87 USD per person each year according to their performance. It can be seen that the policy has clearly defined multiple objectives during the system design: 1) through the government’s purchase of labor services to achieve its goal of protecting the ecological environment, and 2) through Employ the poor to achieve their poverty reduction goals.
However, it faces many constraints in policy enforcement, such as (1) the hierarchical relationship between principal and agent in the process of policy enforcement may lead to deviations in the positioning of policy objectives and the actual implementation of policies. The “PEFRP” are formulated by the central government and enforced by local governments at all levels; village cadres play an importance role in the selection, recruitment, and supervision of EFRs. Generally speaking, the interests and policy goals of the central government and local governments, local officials, and village cadres are not always consistent. For example, the central government formulated this policy to achieve a win-win situation of “ecological protection and poverty reduction,” but local governments may place more emphasis on economic and social objectives than on environmental objectives in order to achieve political promotion. Besides, for local officials, the enforcement of policies may be motivated by the need for political promotion to meet the performance evaluation goals set by the higher-level government. For example, during the poverty alleviation period, the evaluation of many officials is more focused on the effectiveness of poverty alleviation. However, for village cadres, there is no need for political promotion, so in the enforcement of the PEFRP, they may tend to choose poor people who can assist in their own work or have a close social relationship with them. Even if the objectives of different levels of government are consistent with the policy objectives, multiple policy objectives can be prioritized at a certain period. For example, according to the “China Rural Poverty Alleviation and Development Program (2011–2022)”, it is clearly stipulated that governments at all levels are required to achieve poverty alleviation of all poor people under the current poverty line by the end of 2020. The central government has included poverty alleviation goals in local governments. At the same time, the central government also regards “environmental protection” as a basic state policy and enforces environmental inspections from time to time to assess the effectiveness of local governments at all levels in fulfilling environmental responsibilities and controlling environmental pollution. Since the local governments are faced with multiple goals, and higher-level governments have not clarified the priority of poverty reduction and environmental protection at a certain period, such policy misunderstanding may lead to inconsistency between the policy target positioning and the actual enforcement of the policy in PEFRP. Based on the behavioral transmission mechanism of “realistic background—targeting—local choice,” this paper takes the actual practice of re-employment ecological forest rangers for poor households in Sichuan Province as an example to investigate (1) whether the policy enforcement of local governments deviates from the central government’s initial goal positioning in the process of selecting and re-employment ecological forest rangers. (2) If there is a deviation, how does that deviation manifest itself? (3) What are the practical considerations and theoretical explanations behind this kind of inconsistency between the central government’s initial goal positioning and local government’s policy enforcement?
The existing literature mainly focuses mainly on the payments for environmental services (PES) project system design [
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13], target positioning [
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22,
23,
24,
25,
26,
27,
28], implementation effect evaluation [
21,
24,
29,
30,
31,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
39,
40,
41,
42], the consistency of the target and behavior [
26,
39,
42,
43,
44], and the factors that affect target deviation [
22,
26,
39,
45,
46,
47]. Researchers have not yet evaluated differences between the goal positioning of different policies at the beginning of the design, the actual choices of central governments and those of local governments or enforcing agents from the perspective of the “re-employment” behavior of participating subjects, and the verification conditions have not been studied. As a result of this neglect, a logical understanding of the enforcement of ecological compensation policies is lacking. In addition, some studies have proposed the influence of administrative power or political and social background on the enforcement behavior and the effect of ecological compensation policies [
22,
27,
45,
46,
47,
48,
49], but these studies failed to propose a good analytical framework, and they did not select the characteristics of the goal audience based on “re-employment” behavior to verify policy goal positioning and the differences with regard to realistic choices.
Sichuan Province represents a typical province for the PEFRP. It is an important ecological barrier in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River, a key area where ecological function areas, ethnic minorities, and poverty areas overlap. It is also a core area for poverty alleviation and development. It was one of the first provinces in China to start a pilot project for public welfare posts for EFRs. The policy has been enforced in Sichuan for five years (since 2016). At the end of 2018, the province had hired 47,000 poor people who had archival profile cards as EFRs, accounting for approximately 5% of China (there are 34 provincial administrative regions in China) and steadily driving more than 70,000 poor people out of poverty. Therefore, we built on the “realistic background-goal positioning-local choice” theoretical analysis framework using cross-sectional data of 9063 sample EFSs, focusing on the impact of poverty factors and human capital factors on the re-employment of EFRs to evaluate the implementation of PEFRP whether the consistency between the target positioning of central government and the actual behavior of local governments has been achieved in the enforcement process. We aimed to explain the reason for deviation through a theoretical analysis and practice investigation.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In
Section 2, we provide a brief literature review. In
Section 3, we describe our theoretical analysis framework and then introduce the system design (including enforcement) on the PEFRP, and empirical conjecture (including verification ideas). In
Section 4, we present our empirical strategies and the main results. In
Section 5, we discuss various explanations and we conclude.
2. Literature Review
Ecological compensation projects are widely referred to internationally as PESs, and they have attracted the attention of many researchers. PESs can be traced back to Costa Rica in 1997, and the specific policy content and system design have been widely introduced and now cover water, biodiversity, carbon dioxide, soil, and other ecosystems [
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13].
From the perspective of the project’s goal positioning, according to the definition of PESs, PESs emphasize the versatility of the goal [
14], but in terms of the main goal and multi-objective collaboration, the cognition of different researchers has shown great differences. Some researchers believe that the fundamental goal of PESs is to protect the environment, but because the project enforcement area is highly correlated with the area in which the poor population is distributed, poverty reduction has become a collateral effect and is a secondary goal [
15,
16,
17,
18,
19,
26,
27,
28]. Other researchers have shown through some successful PES program experiences that poverty alleviation and environmental protection constitute a win–win situation and are synergistic [
10,
20,
23,
24,
44]. Regarding the poverty population ecological forestry policy (PPEFP), some researchers interpret this policy as “a temporary employment assistance policy” (improve livelihood) whose main goal is to reduce poverty [
25]. PESs can achieve the consistency of multiple goals due to the intersection of regional characteristics, but there are also some PESs designs that do not conform to regional geographic and human characteristics [
50], imperfect supervision or system implementation deviations under asymmetric information [
22], and the multi-level principal-agent problem [
45] bring conflicts between goals and practices. This discussion shows that the enforcement of PESs in different times and spaces has multiple goals, and differences may arise based on the historical background of the policies.
Most previous studies focus on the direct effects of the PESs, and comparing the differences by different policy enforcement methods, no researchers have yet to evaluate the consistency of PESs positioning goals and realistic choices by the perspective of policy re-participation. Some researchers have pointed out that the effect of the PES project is hugely controversial [
39]. Some scholars have found that the enforcement of ecological compensation policies can significantly improve the quality of the ecological environment [
29,
30,
31,
38], but some scholars have pointed out that the enforcement of ecological compensation policies may not provide environmental benefits and ecological protection effects. For example, Hu et al. (2019) found that the enforcement of the Forage–Livestock Balance Policy, which is one kind of the PESs, could not greatly influence the reduction in the number of cattle, since the herders make livestock production decisions in response to livestock market prices [
21]. Many scholars have found that PESs can effectively reduce poverty [
31,
32,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
42,
51], but there are differences in enforcement. For example, some researchers have found that rich farmers get more benefit from PES projects [
32,
33,
34,
35]; however, some researchers have also shown that such projects play a significantly positive impact on increasing the livelihoods of low-income farmers who occupy less land [
35]. In addition, the national programs have a greater income effect than local programs, but local projects are more effective on individuals with a low income [
31]. Besides, different PES programs might have different impact on poverty alleviation. Some researchers argues that the PES programs with direct cash payment can significantly reduce the incidence of poverty and narrow the poverty gap and the internal gap among the poor population, but it is insufficient to drive the endogenous development of poor individuals [
39], while compensation for public welfare posts can effectively drive the endogenous development of poor individuals to a certain extent [
34,
35,
36,
37]. Many researchers agree that PES has emerged as an important policy instrument for ecosystem protection and poverty alleviation [
24,
52,
53]. However, Wu and Jin (2020) argue that the PESs does not necessarily contribute to poverty reduction unless the eco-compensation scheme is purposely designed for it [
54]. Therefore, the enforcement of PES programs in poor areas trends to fall into the poverty trap or falls into the development trajectory of the environmental Kuznets curve, which is not conducive to the development of poor areas or to ecological protection [
3].
There are certain differences in current research conclusions as to whether the enforcement effect of PESs achieves the established goals. Some studies have pointed out that PESs have reached the established “poverty reduction and environmental protection” goals through precise system design and effective supervision and enforcement [
25,
42,
44]. Effective supervision and excitation are the key to ensuring that PES programs achieve a win-win situation of “poverty reduction and environmental protection [
42]. On the contrary, some studies have pointed out that PESs did not meet the established goals and failed to achieve the synergy of “poverty reduction and environmental protection” goals [
25,
39,
43]. The main influencing factors for the failure of PESs to achieve the established goals or the conflict between goals and practice include unreasonable policy and system design, poor property rights [
25,
49], insufficient multi-level agency supervision [
25,
45], government system or law enforcement is not strict [
22,
46], and local government or community participation is insufficient [
25,
45,
46,
47].
The above literature review shows the research content of current studies on PES projects. This provides a useful reference for our research in target combing, variable design and policy effect evaluation, and also provides a basis for our study to be compared with other studies. Given the limited literature and inconsistent results. Based on the reality of PEFRP, from the perspective of EFRs’ renewal, we use the probit binary selection model to evaluate the influencing factors of EFRs’ renewal behavior, and based on the poverty characteristics and human capital characteristics of renewed EFRs, we evaluate the consistency between target positioning of central government and the actual behavior of local governments in the PEFRP. In addition to estimating the impact of poverty factors and human capital factors on the renewal of EFRs, we also controlled the impact of other personal characteristics, family characteristics, and policy enforcement characteristics on the renewal of EFRs.
5. Discussion and Conclusions
We found that wealthy or higher-income groups benefit more from the PEFRP than lower-income groups, consistent with previous studies [
32,
33,
34,
35]. However, previous studies did not deduct the endogenous nature of subsidized income. This study further strengthened the robustness of the results by deducting subsidized income. Through theoretical combing and a practical investigation, an explanation of the role of social capital is proposed. A practical inspection of the enforcement of the EFR policies in the Wolong Special Zone and Pingwu and Qingchuan in Wenchuan County revealed that the choice behavior of the village group seems to indirectly prove the existence of the social capital hypothesis, but the inspection was limited by the content structure of the public data. This study failed to fully verify the mechanism of the social capital hypothesis. Our study also found that the PEFRP pays close attention to poverty targets by selecting the human capital characteristics of the renewed objects, which is contrary to the results of other PES project effect evaluation studies [
24,
29,
30,
31,
52,
53]. This also shows that there is a certain deviation between the central government’s policy objective positioning and the enforcement of local government, which also verifies the conclusions of some researchers that local government or community participation and strengthening the supervision of policy enforcers have an important impact on the effect of policy enforcement [
46,
50].Although our selection of human capital to match environmental protection goals is convincing, there are some shortcomings. The specific deficiencies are as follows. First, the verification of environmental protection goals focused only on the broad human capital characteristics of the re-employment goals and failed to determine the human capital characteristics that match the efficiency of ecological management. Second, we failed to effectively use panel data to evaluate the improvement in local ecology before and after implementing the policy.
The main research conclusions are as follows. First, the enforcement of a continuous PEFRP is not only conducive to poverty reduction but also promotes the continuation of poverty reduction. The prerequisite is that the policy can be continuously enforced. Second, the following characteristics were associated with the re-employment behavior of EFRs (i.e., likely to obtain renewal opportunities): male sex, Han nationality, a small amount of training, a high per income level, no poverty alleviation, and high subsidies. Age, health. and education, which represent the human capital level, have no significant impact on renewal. Third, further analysis of heterogeneity showed that EFRs who have not yet escaped poverty and are impoverished are not given priority to renew their employment. Fourth, the PEFRP pays close attention to poverty reduction goals in the enforcement process. Although it pays attention to poverty reduction goals, it does not give priority to the poorest of poor. Fifth, the imminent pressure of the administrative assessment of the “poverty relief task” is the main reason why local governments choose to focus on the goal of poverty reduction. Additionally, the opportunistic behaviors generated by multi-level agents, especially in regard to the needs of village cadres who need to find work to assist people and in regard to human relations, effectively explain why those in the deepest level of poverty do not benefit.
Based on the above results, we can obtain the following revelations. First, for researchers, it is necessary to use panel data or more detailed micro-survey data and change the poverty level and better reflect the indicators of environmental protection to better assess the effects of policies. In addition, it is necessary to further build a complete social capital indicator system to verify the effect mechanism of social capital on the enforcement of PES projects. Second, for policy makers, clear policy goals are a prerequisite (developing countries may pay more attention to poverty reduction, while developed countries may pay more attention to environmental protection), and the system design of poverty reduction or environmental protection policies needs to consider the actual needs and adjust the system design of the policy according to the changes in actual political, economic, environmental and other constraints, namely, construct a dynamic adjustment mechanism for policies. In addition, to ensure the effective enforcement of policy objectives, it is necessary to strengthen the effective supervision of the direct enforcers of the policy.