Volunteer and satisfied? Rural households' participation in a payments for environmental services programme in Inner Mongolia

Using survey data from Inner Mongolia, this paper explores the role of stakeholder engagement in the implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme, a payments for environmental services (PES) programme designed to restore forest in degraded land. Based on the idea that volunteerism and satisfaction with the programme's outcome are two important components of the programme's viability, we successively analyse the intensity of households' participation in the programme and their reported satisfaction with its economic achievement, which we relate to their stated volunteerism. We show that households' participation intensity in the SLCP is primarily driven by land and location characteristics, and that these findings hold true whether or not the households voluntarily enrolled in the programme. Moreover, as far as participants' satisfaction can be interpreted as an indicator of potential long-term support for the programme, our findings also support plausible sustainability for the programme. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.