Under the new normal, China's forest ecological environment bearing capacity has reached to the upper limit. Forest resources have the problem of suffer from deforestation and a lack of government supervision caused by the lack of a driving mechanism for forest protection and compensation. Although the central government has invested considerable resources, other stakeholders have different interests, which leads to conflict. Cross-regional forest ecological compensation is difficult to realize. However, the evolutionary game model can be used to clarify the relationship between the protective body, the beneficiary subject, and the central government for the protection and compensation of forest ecological environments. This will aid in breaking through the dilemma of ecological protection and compensation and forming effective action mechanisms. In the present study, we developed an evolutionary game model representing the interactions between the protecting regional government and the benefiting regional government based on an analysis of the logical relationships between interest groups in functional areas. We analyzed the game decision-making behavior among local governments under different scenarios with and without the "constraint-motivation" mechanism. The results indicated that cross-regional ecological compensation cannot be achieved without the introduction of the central government's "restriction-incentive" mechanism. In the scenario without the restriction-incentive mechanism, the protecting government chose its strategy by comparing the income from and cost of protecting forest resources. When the net income from protecting forest resources is positive, the regional government still has sufficient incentive to protect forest resources, even if there is no ecological compensation. When the net income of protecting forest resources is negative, the two government groups are likely to fall into the Prisoner's Dilemma of regulatory strategies. The introduction of the "restriction-incentive" mechanism can realize Pareto efficiency of forest ecological protection compensation, and an optimal stable equilibrium strategy can be achieved through the limitation of punishments and rewards from the central government.