A growing literature focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of forest conservation policies, but few studies explore where and under which conditions programs produce net positive benefits. Quantifying the costs and benefits of conservation policy instruments contributes to making impact evaluation more relevant for policy makers and can help to improve program design. Here we analyze the costs and benefits of deforestation avoided by the Peruvian Programa Bosques between 2011 and 2015. Our approach builds on an ex post counterfactual-based impact evaluation and considers spatial heterogeneity in conservation opportunity costs as well as uncertainty across a wide range of parameters. We rely on existing social cost of carbon estimates to value benefits and calculate implementation and administration costs from primary and secondary sources. Our estimates suggest that deforestation was avoided at a negative net future value of US$ 13.7 Million in 2015. Poor conservation performance is mainly due to high implementation and administration costs (~67% of total budget). Nevertheless, participating communities benefited from an estimated net transfer of US$ 7.7 Million. Our result emphasizes the need to boost impact, secure the permanence of the avoided deforestation, and minimize program implementation costs, while paying carefully attention to distributional outcomes.

越来越多的文献侧重于评估森林保护政策的有效性，但很少有研究探讨计划在何处和在何种条件下产生净正收益。量化保护政策工具的成本和收益有助于使影响评估与决策者更相关，并有助于改进计划设计。在这里，我们分析了2011 年至 2015 年秘鲁Programa Bosques避免森林砍伐的成本和收益。我们的方法建立在事后基于反事实的影响评估，并考虑保护机会成本的空间异质性以及各种参数的不确定性。我们依靠碳估算的现有社会成本来评估收益并计算主要和次要来源的实施和管理成本。我们的估计表明，2015 年避免了森林砍伐，净未来值为 1370 万美元。保护绩效不佳主要是由于实施和管理成本高（约占总预算的 67%）。然而，参与社区从估计净转移 770 万美元中受益。我们的结果强调需要提高影响力，确保避免森林砍伐的持久性，并最大限度地降低计划实施成本，