The importance of equity in payments to encourage coexistence with large mammals

Large mammals often impose significant costs such as livestock depredation or crop foraging on rural communities, and this can lead to the retaliatory killing of threatened wildlife populations. One conservation approach – payments to encourage coexistence (PEC) – aims to reduce these costs through financial mechanisms such as compensation, insurance, revenue-sharing, and conservation performance payments. Little is known about the equitability of PEC, however, despite its moral and instrumental importance, prevalence as a conservation approach, and the fact that other financial tools for conservation are often inequitable. Here, using examples from the literature, we first demonstrate the capability of PEC – as currently perceived and implemented – to be inequitable. We then provide three recommendations to improve the equitability of current and future schemes. These include the co-operative design of schemes that promote compensatory equity, the greater consideration of conservation performance payments, and changing the international model for funding PEC in order to reduce global coexistence inequalities. New and existing programmes must address issues of equitability across scales, to ensure that conservation efforts are not undermined by diminished social legitimacy.