Evaluating incentive program success: a hill land class fencing case study

Incentive programs are often employed to encourage landholders to adopt practices that are desirable from a policy perspective. A commonly used measure of the success of these programs has been landholder utilisation of incentives. When utilisation declines it is important to ascertain if this is because the program has been successful and there are few potential participants remaining; or because there is still a large pool of potential participants but the program is failing to attract them. In this study we investigated the reasons for a decline in landholder utilisation of incentives for hill land class fencing (HLCF). Our results suggested that there were a number of on-farm characteristics that described the farms where HLCF was adopted. These included the proportion of property that was classified as steep hills, stock management practices, the affect of steep hill management on lowland areas of the farm and revegetation priorities. While we did not obtain a quantitative estimate of the population of potential adopters of HCLF the information supplied by the farmers we interviewed suggested that HLCF had been adopted by a high proportion of potential adopters; hence landholder participation in the program was approaching a ceiling. This suggested that the observed decline in participation of graziers in the incentive program was an indication that the program had been successful.