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

Abstract 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. We used examples from the literature to examine the capability of PEC—as currently perceived and implemented—to be inequitable. We recommend improving the equitability of current and future schemes through the cooperative design of schemes that promote compensatory equity and greater consideration of conservation performance payments and by changing the international model for funding PEC to reduce global coexistence inequalities. New and existing programs must address issues of equitability across scales to ensure that conservation efforts are not undermined by diminished social legitimacy.