Research overview: conservation performance payments tied to predator presence

This overview reviews performance-payment models that reward communities for conservation outcomes, such as the documented presence of breeding snow leopards or the absence of retaliatory killing, rather than reimbursing individual losses. It examines how outcome-based incentives shift the framing from compensating harm to paying for stewardship, aligning local economic interest with predator survival. The literature discusses monitoring requirements, the risk of perverse incentives, equity of benefit distribution, and the challenge of attribution. Examples span snow leopard and other carnivore systems. The survey positions performance payments as a structurally different approach that can outperform conventional compensation when monitoring is feasible and trust exists.