Category: Ecological economics

Troubled Encounters: Payments for Ecosystem Services in Chiapas, Mexico

Before, nobody could tell me what to do with my trees, because each of us is the owner of his parcel. But now, with the PES programme, it is forbidden to cut trees. [The consultant] said it only concerns members of PES working groups, but the ‘comisariado’ says everyone is affected (farmer NOT involved in PES, Chiapas, Mexico).

What if Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) interfere with local collective action institutions and contested leaderships? Would collective action weaken, or it would be reinforced? Would payments translate in new, legitimate leaderships, or reify existing political inequities?

In a joint effort with colleagues at Conservation International, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development and the University of Antwerp, we have addressed these questions through the lens of collective action theory using a case study from Chiapas, Mexico. Mexico has been a pioneer in the implementation of national PES policy in Latin America, with more than 2.6 million hectares (ha) of the country’s forests under a PES contract in 2014. The community chosen is representative of other socially heterogeneous communities situated in regions characterized by rapid land-use change and which maintain certain degree of collective action to manage their land resources.

We demonstrate that while a majority of the community’s households have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remains outside PES, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non-targeted forests. We show 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. However, it has also ignited social conflict, deepened tenure inequalities, and contributed to the failure of local decision-making institutions, which have not been able to address the contested interests underpinning the fate of community forests.

These findings contribute to highlight the importance of understanding the local institutional context, such as the land tenure regime, collective action processes and local leaderships, to discern why PES is or is not collectively endorsed and how legitimate and enforceable PES goals and rules might be. Overall, the findings demonstrate the limits of PES to achieve lasting conservation outcomes, particularly when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.

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Article: Corbera, E., Costedoat, S., van Hecken, G., Ezzine de Blas, D. (2020) Troubled encounters:  Payments for ecosystem services in Chiapas, Mexico. Development and Change, 51(1): 167-195.

Picture by Sébastien Costedoat: Río Negro; the river bordering the studied community.

PES and motivational crowding in Colombia

In a new article, led by UAB-ICTA’s PhD candidate Lina Moros, we adopt an innovative research design to test for motivational crowding effects through a forest conservation game in Colombia’s Amazon Piedmont, using individual, collective and crop-price premium economic incentives. We implement a post-experiment survey on different types of motivations based on Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to test for changes in motivations. Our findings show that all types of PES, except for the crop-price premium payment, increased conservation behavior in the experiment. However, not all types of payments affected motivations equally: collective payments enhanced social motivations to protect forests and the crop-price premium reduced intrinsic and guilt/regret related motivations. These findings contribute to disentangling the interaction between incentives, motivations and behaviors in a context of agricultural expansion and growing concern for forest conservation, commonly manifested through incentive-based conservation policies like REDD+ and local projects of Payments for Ecosystem Services.

Payments for Environmental Services: a theory-informed review

Building on a theory-based approach to synthesize research on the effectiveness of PES in achieving environmental objectives and socio-economic co-benefits, this article led by Jan Börner and published in World Development highlights the role of (1) contextual dimensions (e.g., political, institutional, and socio-economic conditions, spatial heterogeneity in environmental service values and provision costs, and interactions with pre-existing policies), and (2) scheme design (e.g., payment type and level, contract length, targeting, and differentiation of payments) in determining environmental and socio-economic outcomes. We also review counterfactual-based empirical evaluations, comparative analyses of case-studies, and meta-analyses. Our review suggests that program effectiveness often lags behind the expectations of early theorists. However, we also find that theory has advanced sufficiently to identify common reasons for why payment schemes fail or succeed. Moreover, payment schemes are often rolled out along with other policy instruments in so-called policy mixes. Advances in theory and evaluation research are needed to improve our understanding of how such policy mixes interact with the targeted social-ecological systems.

The full article can be found here, or requested by email if you don’t have access to the publishing journal.

Valuing nature, paying for ecosystem services and realizing social justice

In the latest volume of the journal Ecological Economics, I contribute to ongoing debates about the role of economic valuation in market-based conservation. I respond to an earlier piece by Brett Sylvester Matulis, nuance some of his arguments and set what I believe should be the new agenda for critical scholarship of market-based conservation. I argue for more precision in the claims we make about the role of economic valuation and the impacts of payments for ecosystem services, distinguishing across market-based instruments and across types of outcomes, and for a more nuanced account of the ethical connotations of such instruments. I suggest that such analysis should entail understanding both unequal socio-economic relations and culturally bounded conceptions of justice. Overall, I advocate for the development of a more robust empirical basis to derive generalizations on the procedural, distributive and livelihood implications of market-based instruments for conservation.

Problematizing REDD+…

In a new paper entitled “Problematizing REDD+ as an experiment in payments for ecosystem services” and published in the leading journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, I shed light on a few problems and contradictions of the current global policy framework for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, and sustainably managing forest (REDD+). I argue that REDD+ promotes the commodification of ecosystems’ carbon storage and sequestration functions on a global scale and it is consistent with market-based conservation approaches and the ‘neoliberalization canadian pharmacy of nature’. REDD+ is therefore problematized on the grounds that, first, eases a transition from an ethically informed conservation ethos to a utilitarian one that simplifies nature and undermines socio-ecological resilience; second, relies on a single valuation language that may crowd-out conservation motivations in the short and long term; and, last, is sustained on a ‘multiple-win’ discourse that in practice lacks procedural legitimacy in many developing countries and reproduces existing inequities and forms of social exclusion. The argument is developed drawing on PES literature and insights from critical theorists and practitioners of nature conservation.

You can already read the article online here