Can REDD+ succeed? Occurrence and influence of various combinations of interventions in sub-national initiatives

In a sample of 17 (out of 377) REDD+ initiatives active in the South, these researchers identified the combinations of interventions actually deployed and asked households to assess the impact of these interventions on their forest-related land-use decisions.
They found that 71% of households in their sample had participated in a number of forestry interventions, ranging from one to ten. Around a quarter of these households had been offered conditional direct benefits, most often in combination with non-conditional direct benefits. Nearly half had received only non-conditional direct benefits. Many of these households were also subject to restrictions of various kinds. So, rather than abandoning the well-established IPDC approach in favor of the conditional incentives that conceptually define REDD+, most of the initiative's promoters opted to deploy multiple interventions.

Their approach is validated by the finding that the likelihood of a household reporting that interventions led them to adopt land-use changes that could be classified as reducing carbon emissions is positively and significantly related to the number of interventions they experienced, but is unaffected by whether or not one of these interventions was conditional.
Restrictions were also found to play an important role: 37% of households had experienced at least one negative intervention, and these households were significantly more likely to report that the interventions had induced land-use changes likely to be classified as reducing carbon emissions.