Abstract:Due to the concern with the “tragedy of the commons”, the capacity of community governance is usually underrated in natural resource management such as the natural forest conservation. Nevertheless, the recent studies indicated that the individual′s behavior is bounded-rational and follows social norms such as fairness. In this study, we developed a mathematical model based on evolutionary game theory and behavioral economics, simulated the evolutionary dynamics of the strategies the local people could choose in the context of family-contracted natural resource conservation, and analyzed the role that the fairness norm could play in the conservation program. The result indicated that the rational players are not able to sustain a high level of cooperation for conservation when the material subsidy is only limited and comparable to the costs needed for monitoring; in contrast, improved level of cooperation is possible if the local people comply with the fairness norm, and the convergent equilibrium is determined by the proportion of the players who highly regard the value of fairness. The result in theory predicted the availability of facilitating the participation and cooperation of the local community in the common resource conservation by crowding in the fairness norm with the ecological compensation policies.