| There is a growing interest in incentive-based policies to motivate conservation by landowners. These policies include full- and partial-interest land purchases, tax-based incentives, and tradable or bankable development rights. Using legal and economic analysis, the paper explores potential pitfalls associated with the use of such policies. Incentive-based policies promise to improve the cost effectiveness of habitat preservation, but only if long-run implementation issues are meaningfully addressed. While we compare conservation policies, particular attention is devoted to the use of conservation easements and in particular a set of easement contracts and transactions in the state of Florida. The easement analysis highlights the importance of... |
