Willingness to Pay for Conservation of the Rong Por’s Community Forest in Phayao Province

Abstract

Rong Por community forest was declared to be included in the Doi Luang National Park since 1981, according to the Parliament, Act of 1961. It is the cause of conflict of interest related to government projects and possessory right of land ownership because the houses were in the Doi Luang National Park area. Moreover, the local people were accused of the invasion of forest lands from government officials cause people locals to express themselves as precedent residents the announcement of a national park clearly expressed was not invading.  Therefore, the purposes of this research aimed to study on willingness to pay for conservation of the Rong Por’s community forest and to analyze the factors affecting the willingness to pay for conservation of Rong Por’s community forest located in Dongjen Sub-District, Phukamyao District, Phayao Province, Thailand. The primary data were collected by a questionnaire, a total of 400 sample sizes. The logistic regression with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) was theoretically employed to analyze what factors affecting the values of willingness to pay. The empirical results showed that the respondents are unwilling to pay for conservation because they were confirmed that they were not intruders. Moreover, the analysis from Logistic Regression depicted that the factors affecting the willingness to pay for forest conservation are more benefits to this research and can be used as the guidelines for the policy-maker in the local area to conserve the Rong Por’s community forest.