Fight Fire with Finance — A Randomized Trial of Conditional Cash Incentives Against Land-Clearing Fires (West Kalimantan, Indonesia)

Fight Fire with Finance was a large-scale randomized field experiment run by Indonesia's National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) with researchers from Stanford University and the Australian National University. Across 275 fire-prone villages in four districts of West Kalimantan province, 75 villages were randomly assigned to a conditional cash-transfer arm and the remainder served as controls. Treatment villages received an upfront payment of IDR 10 million (~US$750) plus the promise of a further IDR 150 million (~US$10,800) if satellite hotspot and burn-scar data showed the village stayed completely fire-free through the 2018 dry season.
The trial's authors (Edwards, Falcon, Hadiwidjaja, Higgins, Naylor and Sumarto) found that 28% of incentivized villages remained fire-free against 29% of control villages — statistically indistinguishable outcomes. A separate 2022 re-analysis by researchers at the SMERU Research Institute, using the same 275-village dataset, likewise found 'no effects on fire outcomes' from the conditional payment, concluding that climate variation, land-use decentralization policy and population density explained burning patterns far better than the incentive itself.
Both studies attribute the null result to the economics of land clearing: burning to prepare land for oil-palm smallholdings is cheap and fast, while the promised payout could be forfeited by the action of a single non-complying household in the village, and enforcement of no-burn pledges within villages proved weak. The result is a rare, methodologically strong (randomized) negative finding that has informed subsequent Indonesian fire-prevention policy debates away from blanket village-level cash incentives and toward targeted enforcement and land-tenure reform.

Read the full analysis: https://smeru.or.id/en/publication/using-conditional-cash-payments-prevent-land-clearing-fires-cautionary-findings