Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES): evolution towards efficient and fair incentives for multifunctional landscapes (original) (raw)
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Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2012
Payments for environmental services (PES), or non-provisioning ecosystem services, target alignment of micro-economic incentives for land users with meso-and macro-economic societal costs and benefits of their choices across stakeholders and scales. They can interfere with or complement social norms and rights-based approaches at generic (land use planning) and individual (tenure, use rights) levels, and with macro-economic policies influencing the drivers to which individual agents respond. In many developing country contexts, community scale factors strongly influence land users' decisions while unclear land rights complicate the use of market-based instruments. PES concepts need to adapt. Multiple paradigms have emerged within the broad PES domain. Evidence suggests that forms of "co-investment in stewardship" alongside rights are the preferred entry point. Commodification of ES and ES markets might evolve later on, but require strong government regulation to set and enforce rules of the game. We frame hypotheses for wider testing and "no-regrets" recommendations for practitioners.
Co-investment in ecosystem services: global lessons from payment and incentive schemes
2018
Nature cannot be valued, but the services that people derive from it can and land use decisions to protect or enhance such services can be supported by economic incentives. • Effects of land use on human being, on-site and off-site, are normally a mixture of positive and negative impacts on the various layers of a human well-being pyramid. • Provisioning services, for which markets usually exist, tend to get prioritized over regulating and cultural ecosystem services, unless these other services are actively supported. • Economic incentives ("payments for ecosystem services", PES) are part of a policy bundle of regulation ("sticks"), incentives ("carrot") and internalized motivation ("sermons"). • We present a framework for analysing the way PES instruments have so far been used, with testable propositions on ecological, economic, social and policy aspects.
This paper offers a review and analysis of the key issues and different perspectives in the Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) debate. We discuss how the current debate has to a certain degree moved beyond ‘neoliberal’ vs. ‘non-neoliberal’ discussions, instead recognizing the variegated ways in which this policy tool plays out in the field. We argue, however, that despite this progress PES research remains weakly theorized in social and political terms, resulting in only superficial understanding of the role of culture, agency, social diversity and power relations in the shaping of PES institutions and their outcomes. Building on insights from other fields and disciplines in the social sciences –in particular critical institutionalism, social anthropology and political ecology-, we subject some of the common assumptions underlying mainstream and alternative conceptualizations of PES and identify the main issues that, we believe, deserve more attention in future research. More specifically, we explore three key challenges in current PES research related to the tendency (1) to assume that institutions can be designed in order to make them ‘fit’ specific human-nature problems; (2) to oversimplify culture and social diversity through the apolitical concept of ‘social capital’; and (3) to conceptualize human agency, collective action, and institutional change through either overly-rational or overly-structuralist models. We argue that an expanded actor-oriented, socially-informed and power-sensitive conceptualization of PES can help generate novel insights in the power geographies underlying institutional logics, and thus the complex ways in which PES policies are shaped and experienced in the field.
2014
Incentives to manage ecosystem services have been heralded as important mechanisms to increase efficiency in biodiversity conservation and to facilitate greater equity in the distribution of natural resources. These interventions aim to control the use of natural resources by altering resource users’ land-use decisions and environmental behaviours. There is relatively little evidence, however, about the perceived benefits and societal values of incentives, and the institutional effectiveness of incentives to alter land-use behaviours to increase compliance. It is also unclear how incentive-based management institutions align with the local biophysical, social, economic, and political dimensions of the social-ecological systems (SES) in which they are implemented. The thesis examines the ways in which incentives are used to manage ecosystem services and their institutional effectiveness to alter landowner environmental behaviours in the complex reality of the world It is important to...
Payments for Ecosystem Services—the Case of Forests
Current Forestry Reports, 2016
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) is a trending topic in environmental resource management. The literature on PES has been growing almost exponentially, and practical applications of PES schemes are mushrooming all around the world. In this review article, I present the existing definitions of PES, the factors to consider during the design and implementation stages of PES programs, as well as discuss the recent theoretical debates related to PES in the literature-specifically those related to commodification and legitimacy of PES, its behavioral implications as well as the issues of power and equity. Despite a wealth of accumulated knowledge in the theoretical and experimental fields related to PES, there is still a considerable lack of empirical studies assessing the practical implementation of PES in the field. Only a few schemes are actually systematically assessed, and there is still a lack of a unified comprehensive framework for the thorough evaluation of existing practical experiences. I outline some of the future research challenges that need to be tackled in order to gain a better understanding of the opportunities that the PES mechanism offers to environmental policy makers and other interested stakeholders. Keywords Payments for environmental services. Environmental governance. Economic incentives 1 The acronym PES is used in the literature to refer both to payments for "ecosystem services"-that is, emphasizing the enhancement of "nature" services, and for "environmental services"-that is, including amenities provided by the "built" or "actively managed" environment [136]. While there are compelling arguments to prefer one term over the other [25••, 41••], in this paper, I use these two terms interchangeably.
Oryx, 2012
We explore the potential for payments for ecosystem services (PES) to reconcile conservation and development goals, using a case study of an experimental PES intervention around the Nyungwe National Park in Rwanda. The scheme involves the purchase of biodiversity conservation services from local communities in four selected locations. Although a portion of the payment is awarded at the household level, it is the collective action of the community that determines the level of the payment. Contracts are negotiated annually and include performance indicators within each participating community. We examine the ability of PES to achieve conservation and development objectives, through three sub-questions: Is the PES scheme effective? Is it legitimate and fair? Is it equitable? Our findings indicate that the relationship between these evaluation criteria is complex, with both trade-offs and synergies. In this case study the effectiveness of PES is dependent on the equitable distribution of the payment, participants' belief and acceptance of the service being paid for, institutional histories that aid in the establishment of legitimacy and fairness, and the complementary nature of PES to more conventional enforcement methods.
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are one prominent strategy to address economic externalities of resource extraction and commodity production, improving both social and ecological outcomes. But do PES and related incentive programs achieve that lofty goal? Along with considerable enthusiasm, PES has faced a wide range of substantial critiques. In this paper, we characterize seven major classes of concerns associated with common PES designs, and use these as inspiration to consider potential avenues for improvements in PES outcomes and uptake. The problems include (1) new externalities, (2) misplacement of rights and responsibilities, (3) crowding out existing motivations, (4) efficiency-equity tradeoffs, (5) monitoring costs, (6) limited applicability, and top-down prescription/alienating agency. As currently practiced, many PES programs are thus of limited benefit and even potentially detrimental to sustainability. From this dire conclusion, we highlight several innovations that might be combined and extended in a novel approach to PES that may address all seven problems. Recognizing that PES necessarily articulate and even normalize values, our proposed approach entails designing these institutions intentionally to articulate rights and responsibilities conducive to sustainability-those we might collectively seek to entrench. Problems remain, and new ones may arise, but the proposed approach may offer a way to reimagine PES as a major social and economic tool for enabling sustainable relationships with nature, conserving and restoring ecosystems and their benefits for people now and in the future.