Troubled Encounters: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Chiapas,Mexico

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is a well-established conservation policy approach worldwide. Where forests are owned and managed by rural and indigenous communities, PES initiatives often aim to incentivize the joint adoption of forest protection and sustainable management practices. However, not all communities might have the will or capacity to maintain such practices over the long term. This article examines a PES programme in a rural community of Chiapas, Mexico. It shows that while a majority of the community's landowners have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remain outside the PES programme, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non-targeted forests. The authors argue that this incipient form of fragmented collective action on forest management results from challenged leaderships, and from PES accommodating a history of increasing individuation of the commons. This accommodation, however, has ignited social conflict, reified tenure inequalities, and failed to strengthen local institutions to enable them to legitimately deal with the contested interests that underpin the fate of community forests. This article shows the limits of PES when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.     

Translating Water Fund Payments for Ecosystem Services in the Ecuadorian Andes

As a form of environmental governance, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is imbued with ideological values that can conflict with those of participating rural communities. The discursive frame surrounding PES may be contentious, even if the conservation activities promoted by these initiatives are not. Moving PES into practice therefore requires a process of translation from urban-based practitioners to rural communities. Drawing upon an empirical case study of FONAG, a water fund from Ecuador that is often promoted as the ideal type, this article employs data from participant observation, key informant interviews and textual materials to examine this process of translation. The article focuses particularly on the efforts to negotiate the discourse of PES that move the projects into on-the-ground practice. While Ecuador's political context has softened the emphasis on economically valuing ecosystem services, FONAG uses neoliberal conservation narratives that identify rural poverty as the main cause of environmental degradation and target the reform of local people through economic incentives. To enrol communities, however, intermediaries are needed to translate water fund PES to appeal to local perspectives, values and institutions. The author argues that contrasting narratives of PES can exist simultaneously between the entities that are implementing PES and the targets of that implementation.     

Transitions in Payments for Ecosystem Services in Guatemala: Embedding Forestry Incentives into Rural Development Value Systems

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes increasingly reflect multiple stakeholder demands and rarely operate in market form. In Guatemala, the earliest forestry incentives — a form of PES — benefited larger landowners and functioned as subsidies for both extractive forest production and ecosystem services. Smallholders and indigenous communal land managers in Guatemala campaigned for PES programmes to meet their needs, leading to the creation of a second programme that focuses on improving rural development, coupled with ecosystem services. This article examines how these historically marginalized groups have used PES as an opportunity to engage with the state and demand embedded development that more strongly reflects their values of forests and their desired relationship with the Guatemalan state. As a result of this activism, these Guatemalan forestry incentives reach smallholders more successfully than PES programmes in many other countries. However, more far-reaching changes in land use are tempered by power imbalances and structural inequalities that are unaddressed and, in fact, reinforced by PES programmes, such as underfunding, narrow conceptions of land ownership, and unequal representation.     

Rubber and Carbon: Opportunity Costs,Incentives and Ecosystem Services in Acre,Brazil

The concept of ‘opportunity costs’ has been important in theoretical discussions of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). It focuses attention on economic trade-offs of individual landholders and can make providing ecosystem services, such as tropical forest carbon sequestration, appear to be a cost-effective way to reduce near-term carbon emissions. Yet in practice, the concept may be less useful. This article examines how a programme in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil, has moved away from the concept of opportunity costs, challenging its theoretical importance. Instead of payments, the Acre programme offers ‘incentives’ intended to make rural people produce more whilst deforesting less. It resonates with the neoliberal commodification of carbon and the dominant valorization of intensive agriculture. Yet it also enlists lessons from Acre's history of rubber production and its rubber tapper-led social movement, namely that the living forest can be monetarily valuable and that its use can facilitate its protection. This article shows how local history and culture can be used to reshape PES.     

Situated Payments for Ecosystem Services: Local Agencies in the Implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in Southwest China

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an innovative initiative to use market instruments for conservation that has spread across the world since the late 1990s. In assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of PES initiatives, global scholarship has focused on an outcome-oriented approach. This has led to debate on PES programmes’ contributions to, and the trade-offs between, conservation and development. Taking the Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP) in China as an example, this article uses a process-oriented analytical approach to provide novel understandings of PES as a specific type of development practice. The article shows how notions of equity and justice, local knowledge and local institutions have played a role in shaping the processes and outcomes of the SLCP. The actions of local stakeholders in an interplay with the state created a space for negotiating, adapting and adjusting PES implementation, which eventually contributed to a local development pathway for meeting both national conservation interests and local economic development needs. This indicates that attention to situated agency can help illuminate how PES can be smoothly implemented and effectively negotiated in developing countries.     

Making Territory and Negotiating Citizenship in a Climate Mitigation Initiative in Indonesia

For almost two decades, the concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has been widely adopted in Indonesia, in policy initiatives ranging from pilot projects to more established PES schemes and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programmes. Drawing on a case study of a REDD+ initiative in Aceh, Indonesia, this article analyses how the initiative became an avenue to renegotiate political authority, territory and citizenship. Analysis of relevant documents, combined with focus group discussions and interviews at local and national levels, reveals the complex processes by which the authority to govern forest is claimed and legitimized through the revision of provincial land-use plans, and shows how citizenship is rearticulated through participatory mapping processes. The article demonstrates that the initiative has been negotiated and reshaped to conform to local aspirations for greater control over forests and to achieve broader development goals. The discourses of green economy and REDD+ have provided the Aceh government and communities with a new ‘surface of engagement’ to express Acehnese struggles over territory and citizenship by aligning with global climate change issues.     

Conserving Natures? Co-producing Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mongolian Rangelands

Despite well-founded concerns over the proliferation of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes, critical geographers have begun to challenge the ‘milieu of apprehension’ associated with PES (Jackson and Palmer, 2014: 122). There is a growing call for more nuanced analyses of ways in which the ecosystem services paradigm and PES may, in particular circumstances, encompass and make legible diverse ways of being in/knowing nature and provide opportunities for local/indigenous actors to advance their own needs and values. Adopting a ‘radical pragmatist’ approach, the author of this article worked with Mongolian herder groups to develop a locally-grounded manifestation of PES, with specific attention to the incorporation of diverse socio-ecological relations, beliefs and values. The article argues that such co-produced iterations of PES, with due attention to tripartite dimensions of environmental justice, can facilitate local stewardship, whilst eschewing enclosure of commons and crowding out of non-market values and motives for conservation, albeit shaped and constrained by diverse manifestations of power.     

An Alternative Theorization of Payments for Ecosystem Services from Mexico: Origins and Influence

The national Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes of Mexico were originally based on the neoclassical economic theory that conceptualized ecosystems as factories whose various outputs can be quantified and converted to commodities. This model of PES clashed with an alternative theorization, Compensation for Ecosystem Services (CES), with home-grown roots in the ontological orientation and contextualized experience of an epistemic community of public intellectuals with deep engagement in rural Mexico. While built upon the same basic premise — that healthy ecosystems produce services of value — the CES model reimagines payments as compensation for the sustainable stewardship and labour of rural communities and, mediated by the state, as a means to counteract the systemic structural inequities between rural and urban and global North and South. Based on discourse analysis of a series of key actor interviews, longitudinal participant observation and policy analysis, this article explores: 1) the common conceptual underpinnings in the theory of CES, but also the variances; 2) the specific influence of this model on the design of the national PES programmes; and 3) the ways in which this influence has been mediated by politics and shifting relations of power in Mexico.     

Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more ‘rational’, effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co-opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market-based environment and development policies more broadly.     

Payments for Ecosystem Services in Nicaragua: Do Market‐based Approaches Work?

The concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is gaining increasing attention among scholars as well as conservation and development practitioners. The premises of this innovative conservation approach are appealing: private land users, usually poorly motivated to protect nature on their land, will do so if they receive payments from environmental service buyers which cover part of the land users’ opportunity costs of developing the land. However, this article warns against an over‐enthusiastic adoption of a one‐sided market‐based PES approach. Based on a field study of the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management Project (RISEMP), one of the main PES pilot projects in Nicaragua, it suggests that a mixture of economic and non‐economic factors motivated farmers to adopt the envisaged silvopastoral practices and that the actual role of PES is mistakenly understood as a simple matter of financial incentives. The authors argue that PES approaches should be understood as a part of a broader process of local institutional transformation rather than as a market‐based alternative for allegedly ineffective government and/or community governance.     

The Political Life of Natural Infrastructure: Water Funds and Alternative Histories of Payments for Ecosystem Services in Valle del Cauca,Colombia

This article shows the two-way relation between global norms and local conditions as they shape Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) theory and practice, through a case study of a water fund in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, the heartland of the country's sugarcane industry. Drawing on interviews, survey data and historical research, the article argues that the water fund should be understood in the context of the history of infrastructure for the sugarcane industry in the region, and that this infrastructural perspective provides a more nuanced insight into the fund's political life than the traditional PES framing. Furthermore, the article shows how the norms embedded in this locally grown programme circulated through international networks to influence PES theory and design. This case offers one example of the need to attend to the multiple and geographically specific histories of actually existing PES in order to understand its diversity in the present.     

Indigenous peoples,local communities,and Payments for Ecosystem Services

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are reshaping the governance of ecosystems and natural resources around the world. These programs often occur in spaces that are unceded, contested, or otherwise not legally recognized as Indigenous homelands, customary areas, and territories. Building on the discourses of Indigenous self‐determination, nationhood, and cultural responsibilities, this paper examines how PES programs produce unique outcomes for Indigenous peoples as ecosystem services providers. Our findings demonstrate and substantiate three themes that impact Indigenous ecosystem services providers uniquely: (1) the internationally recognized right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous peoples; (2) the reinforcement of settler colonial jurisdiction; and (3) mismatches between Indigenous knowledges and PES‐type approaches. The ways that PES programs run the risk of reifying and reducing Indigenous knowledges have not yet been adequately considered within current PES approaches. Our findings enable a conceptualization of PES as a new conservation tool within ongoing histories of land management and dispossession by settler colonial governments. We assess the strengths and challenges of PES programs as a departure from previous conservation modalities.     

Adapting (Municipal) Form to (Provincial) Function: City–County Separation and the Introduction of the Consolidated Municipal Service Manager System in Ontario,Canada

In 1998, the province of Ontario introduced the Consolidated Municipal Service Manager (CMSM) system, which effectively downloaded the responsibility for delivery and partial funding for a range of social services to municipalities. Separated cities and counties—a unique system of municipal organization in Ontario that draws a sharp institutional distinction between urban and rural areas—were given a particularly wide range of discretion over the implementation of these services. A number of these jurisdictions experienced an array of problems reaching a local solution. Some even wound up in arbitration. This article examines the implementation of the CMSM, focusing specifically on the unique institutional arrangement found in counties with separated cities, finding that the provincial government overlooked the institutional design of city–county separation, hindering the policy downloading process. Overall, it is argued that the local institutional environment is key when shifting policy responsibility from central to local actors.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

Gender equality: a core dimension in Rural Development Programmes in Austria?

The supranational gender equality regime of the European Union (EU), in place since the 1990s, affects gender-related social policy including the so-called ‘gender-neutral’ policy fields such as the common agricultural policy and rural development policy. Especially, the implementation of gender equality in all policy fields through the strategy of gender mainstreaming in EU Structural Funds and Rural Development Programmes has become a key challenge for political and administrative players and stakeholders. Analysis reveals that the existing institutional, political and social barriers for an effective implementation of gender equality in rural development policy are manifold. Instead of promoting rural women's agency and empowerment, Rural Development Programmes and processes in Austria are preserving and perpetuating traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures in rural society.     

Targeting Research for Poverty Reduction in Marginal Areas of Rural Syria

Agricultural research in marginal dry areas can contribute to reducing poverty through the development of technological, institutional and policy options for poor farmers. Such research should address diversified opportunities and development pathways. This article analyses the diversity of livelihood strategies of rural people living in the Khanasser Valley in northwestern Syria, an area that is typical of marginal drylands. It proposes an operational classification of households based on their different livelihood strategies, applying an integrated methodology within a Sustainable Livelihoods framework. Households are classified into three clusters: agriculturists, labourers and pastoralists. The article examines the diversity of livelihoods involved, and considers where and how research should be directed to have greatest impact on poverty. Given that rural households are not homogeneous but dynamic entities, with diverse assets, capabilities and opportunities, the definition of household typologies can help to target development research. The article concludes that while agriculturists benefit most, poor labourers with enough land can also gain from pro‐poor agricultural research. The poorest households with little land, and pastoralists, benefit little or only indirectly.     

The importance of communal forests in carbon storage: Using and destabilizing carbon measurement in understanding Guatemala's payments for ecosystem services

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are a conservation initiative that offer payments to people who own or manage lands that provide desired ecosystem services. Utilizing mixed methods, I examine how PES in the form of government-issued forestry incentives interact with land tenure to affect carbon storage in Guatemala's Western Highlands. Land tenure is a larger determining factor for carbon storage than payments, as communal forests managed by Indigenous Maya K'iche' communities have significantly higher carbon stocks than private landholdings in these same communities. No statistically significant differences were found in carbon stocks between incentivized and non-incentivized plots, and participants enrolled only a fraction of their land, likely prioritizing enrollment of degraded plots. These results indicate the importance of using both social and physical science methods to understand the physical outcomes and social context of forest management. I also reflect on why carbon storage is often prioritized, drawing on a critical physical geography framework to analyze carbon accounting methods. Measuring carbon storage gives us the tools to describe the success of communal forest management, yet I also caution relying on the quantification of ecosystem services as a method for landscape valuation and suggest avoiding prioritizing carbon storage and sequestration.     

Authority over Forests: Empowerment and Subordination in Senegal's Democratic Decentralization

Senegal's 1998 forestry code transfers rights to control and allocate forest access to elected rural councils, ostensibly giving the elected authorities significant material powers with respect to which they can represent the rural population. But the Forest Service is unwilling to allow rural councils to exercise these powers. To retain control, foresters use pressure, bribes and threats while taking advantage of the inability of the rural representatives to influence actors higher up in government. They justify themselves with arguments of national good and local incompetence. The foresters ally with urban‐based forest merchants and are supported by the sub‐prefect. Despite the transfer of forest rights, the foresters continue to allocate access to lucrative forest opportunities — in this case charcoal production and exchange — to the merchants. Despite holding effective property rights over forest, such as the right to exclude others, rural councils remain marginal and rural populations remain destitute. The councils cannot represent their populations and therefore cannot gain legitimacy: they have no authority. Despite progressive new laws, the Forest Service helps to maintain Senegal's healthy urban charcoal oligopsonies, while beating back fledgling local democracy.     

Unequal Access to Payments for Ecosystem Services: The Case of Costa Rica

Using Costa Rica's experience with its payments for ecosystem services (PES) programme, this article examines how and why some groups come to be excluded from participating in the programme. It demonstrates that Costa Rica's PES programme results in payments that generally go to larger landowners and tend to exclude certain kinds of smallholders, and that these patterns occur despite concerted state efforts to include the rural poor. The author argues that access exclusions found in PES are the result of historical patterns of agrarian settlement interacting with the state's inability to recognize certain forms of property claims in the context of PES, with the latter condition emerging through ongoing efforts to transform the administration of the nation's property regime in ways that will render it more legible to markets. This case study shows the importance of understanding how access restrictions emerge from the complex relations between multiple state institutions and agrarian producers in the implementation of PES.     

The contradictory logic of global ecosystem services markets

Commodification and transnational trading of ecosystem services is the most ambitious iteration yet of the strategy of ‘selling nature to save it’. The World Bank and UN agencies contend that global carbon markets can slow climate change while generating resources for development. Consonant with ‘inclusionary’ versions of neoliberal development policy, advocates assert that international payment for ecosystem services (PES) projects, financed by carbon-offset sales and biodiversity banking, can benefit the poor. However, the World Bank also warns that a focus on poverty reduction can undermine efficiency in conservation spending. The experience of ten years of PES illustrates how, in practice, market-efficiency criteria clash directly with poverty-reduction priorities. Nevertheless, the premises of market-based PES are being extrapolated as a model for global REDD programmes financed by carbon-offset trading. This article argues that the contradiction between development and conservation observed in PES is inevitable in projects framed by the asocial logic of neoclassical economics. Application in international conservation policy of the market model, in which profit incentives depend upon differential opportunity costs, will entail a net upward redistribution of wealth from poorer to wealthier classes and from rural regions to distant centres of capital accumulation, mainly in the global North.