Payments for Ecosystem Services

Habitat banking at a standstill

In many countries worldwide, development projects are asked to comply with the “mitigation hierarchy” in environmental impact assessment. They must avoid environmental impacts as much as possible in the project design phase, minimize unavoidable impacts through specific measures during implementation, address impacts on-site through specific remediation and restoration environmental activities, and finally offset the residual environmental impacts of the project that cannot be mitigated either near the affected habitats or further afield. The latter are generally known as biodiversity offsets, a type of compensatory measure which should in theory result in a “no net loss” of biodiversity, or even in a net gain. In the European Union (EU), compensatory measures have been implemented in the context of development projects located within the Natura 2000 network of protected areas (European Commission, 2007: 11).

In this context, habitat banking has gained traction within some EU member states as one possible means to deliver compensation for development projects outside the Natura 2000 network by implementing compensatory measures in advance, thus enabling developers to purchase credits from established compensation schemes (habitat banks) to offset their impacts. These habitat banks might or not be located within Natura 2000 protected sites, but the credits generated are intended to be ecologically equivalent to the impacts of development projects in terms of ecosystem functions, properties and species composition, but also ideally in terms of actual and potential resource use and any associated cultural services. In habitat banking, such equivalence is sought by establishing metrics that permit the exchange of units of habitat destroyed, or species affected, with units of the same habitat or species conserved, thus enabling a regulatory market of offset credits to develop, mediated by existing or newly designed public institutions.

In a new Open Access article co-written with Sara Maestre-Andrés, Morgan Robertson and Rebecca Lave, we investigate the design of the technical guidelines that should underpin habitat banking implementation in Spain and we highlight why such guidelines have not yet been approved by the government to mainstream implementation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted from 2014 to 2018, we show who was included or excluded from the guidelines’ design process, and we highlight the arguments put forward by different actors to contest or support habitat banking more generally.

We show that the process of designing the guidelines was opaque and non-inclusive, driven by a small constituency of actors who sought to create investment opportunities for biodiversity conservation on private lands. These were a few consultancies, large landowners, policy entrepreneurs and government staff. The process was grounded on a false social consensus which concealed alternative understandings of how environmental impacts should be addressed, for example by improving the quality and long-term sustainability of on-site restoration measures, i.e. compliance with the first three steps of the mitigation hierarchy, or even challenging the convenience of certain large-scale development projects that promoted economic growth.

We also demonstrate that the current delay in producing the guidelines can be explained by three circumstances. First, habitat banking was challenged by many civil society groups on the grounds of its market-based approach. The idea of compensating habitat destruction with ecological improvements elsewhere was strongly opposed by environmental NGOs, which argued would epitomize the neoliberalisation of environmental management by treating impacts and environmental benefits as tradeable debits and credits, and undermine the role of the state in biodiversity conservation.

Second, the necessary data to undertake such type of market-based exchanges were not available or accurate enough to devise effective habitat banks, with ecological metrics involved in quantifying offsets seen as too subjective. This was an idea widely shared by the interviewed NGOs and ecologists. In the words of one of them:

‘The criteria of ecology and what policy-makers promote sometimes do not match. The credit exchange system that policy-makers propose is a way to enable doing what they want to do, without caring about the consequences for conservation. The team that has proposed this policy tool has a lack of knowledge of the ecology of the habitats. It is difficult to improve the status of a habitat’.’

Third and finally, habitat banking in Spain has been delayed because key government agencies at national and regional levels lack resources and political will; limited conservation budgets, government officers argued, would not allow them to hire and train the staff required to run and monitor biodiversity offsetting. (In a post-Covid economy, these constraints may amplify).

In conclusion, we argue that the current standstill in the design of the technical guidelines that should govern the implementation of habitat banking in Spain reveals the struggles and difficulties that even well-resourced states can face when establishing rules for habitat banking and the trade in biodiversity offsets. The Spanish experience with habitat banking, however, is not yet a case of a failed offsetting ‘project’. Rather, we think it is a frustrated dream of a few market-based conservation advocates and a national government that has not yet sensed enough social and political support for the policy to compel its implementation. Only time will tell if such a dream comes true.

Article: Maestre-Andrés, S., Corbera, E., Robertson, M., Lave, R. (2020) Habitat banking at a standstill: the case of Spain. Environmental Science and Policy, 109: 54-63.

Picture copyright: @cartoonralph. Retrieved from www.conservationbytes.com

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.

Beyond market logics in PES

As originally conceived, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes provide conditional cash transfers directed to poor farmers and land users in exchange for greener land use practices that enhance carbon sequestration, water provision, or biodiversity protection. Two decades of experience with the PES approach has demonstrated that few, if any, initiatives conform to the assumptions that underlie the original economic model.

This collection of articles, guest edited by Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza, Pamela McElwee, Gert van Hecken and myself, examines why these initiatives, constructed on market‐based principles and promoted as part of the neoliberal political project, often do not look nearly as ‘market‐like’ or neoliberal on the ground. Through subtle, situated, empirically rich and theoretically informed analyses, the 10 articles that comprise this special issue analyse the variegated ways and degrees to which original market-based models have been adopted, contested, adapted, hybridized and transformed to fit other ontologies and purposes.

The articles are based on research conducted in a diversity of geographies and contexts, and a variety of types and scales of PES approaches. These range from NGO‐initiated, small‐scale carbon offsetting on the steppes of Mongolia and watershed management projects in Colombia and Ecuador, to regional projects for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) in Indonesia and Brazil, to nationally scaled PES policies of the centralized states of Mexico, Guatemala, China and Vietnam.

Taking a political ecology approach, all articles frame their analyses of specific PES initiatives in the global South as an often‐idiosyncratic form of development practice that is influenced by and mediates between global structural trajectories (e.g. capitalism, developmentalism or environmentalism) and the locally situated, historically defined and grounded practices of the actors involved. In this sharpening of our understanding of what PES is in practice and what it can become, we begin to see that certain required components of the neoclassical economic model, promoted by the neoliberal political project — such as the need for valuation of nature, the creation of institutions, and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — also afford and can allow for local interpretations and flexibility.

The special issue contributes to a growing body of research that sheds light on the ways and degrees to which subjects of neoliberal interventions are able to find ‘surfaces of engagement’ through which they can, to a greater or lesser extent, alter, adapt and, in some cases, create spaces for wholesale transformations of exogenously imposed models in conformity to their own aims and goals. Feel free to ask me for the papers if you cannot get hold of them online.