No abstract

When deciding how to conserve biodiversity, practitioners navigate diverse missions, sometimes conflicting approaches, and uncertain trade‐offs. These choices are based not only on evidence, funders’ priorities, stakeholders’ interests, and policies, but also on practitioners’ personal experiences, backgrounds, and values. Calls for greater reflexivity—an individual or group's ability to examine themselves in relation to their actions and interactions with others—have appeared in the conservation science literature. But what role does reflexivity play in conservation practice? We explored how self‐reflection can shape how individuals and groups conserve nature. To provide examples of reflexivity in conservation practice, we conducted a year‐long series of workshop discussions and online exchanges. During these, we examined cases from the peer‐reviewed and gray literature, our own experiences, and conversations with 10 experts. Reflexivity among practitioners spanned individual and collective levels and informal and formal settings. Reflexivity also encompassed diverse themes, including practitioners’ values, emotional struggles, social identities, training, cultural backgrounds, and experiences of success and failure. Reflexive processes also have limitations, dangers, and costs. Informal and institutionalized reflexivity requires allocation of limited time and resources, can be hard to put into practice, and alone cannot solve conservation challenges. Yet, when intentionally undertaken, reflexive processes might be integrated into adaptive management cycles at multiple points, helping conservation practitioners better reach their goals. Reflexivity could also play a more transformative role in conservation by motivating practitioners to reevaluate their goals and methods entirely. Reflexivity might help the conservation movement imagine and thus work toward a better world for wildlife, people, and the conservation sector itself.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs have been increasingly studied with a policy mix perspective. So far, the focus has been on PES' interplay with other conservation instruments and resulting environmental outcomes at meso-and macrolevels. Though PES often operate among "poor" forest-dwelling communities in the Global South, our knowledge on PES' interactions with poverty alleviation policies is scarce, especially at the microlevel. This article examines PES' interactions-in terms of joint coverage, management, and spending of revenues, and socioeconomic effects of participation-with a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in a case study of six communities in Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, Mexico. The article builds a dual framework combining policy mix analysis with an actor-oriented approach focused on participants' microagency, and is based on in-depth, qualitative research. Results reveal widespread joint PES and CCT coverage, and patterns of specialization between different household members regarding the management and spending of program revenues. Results also show positive, multilevel policy interactions as participants combine resources to pursue individual and collective socioeconomic strategies. The article highlights the creative ways in which local stakeholders integrate individual policies within their broader livelihoods, and how coordination failures among policy-implementing institutions and deficient public services limit participants' ability to achieve sustained livelihood improvements. The article also highlights how a focus on microlevel policy interactions complements meso-and macrolevel analyses for a better understanding of PES' role in a policy mix and concludes by providing some recommendations for building implementation synergies and improving program design. K E Y W O R D S Chiapas, conditional cash transfers (CCT), Lacandon rainforest, Mexico, payments for ecosystem services (PES), policy interactions, policymix, poverty alleviation

No abstract

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are incentive-based instruments that provide conditional economic incentives for natural resources management. Research has shown that when economic incentives are parachuted into rural communities, participation and benefits are collectively negotiated and shared. However, we know little about how benefit-sharing evolves over time in community-based PES. To address this gap, we examine distributional justice in four communities of the state of Chiapas, Mexico, which participate in a PES programme, and we assess how local justice principles compare with the programme’s goals. Our analysis reveals patterns of both continuity and change in how communities share PES benefits, which reflect a suite of contradictory justice principles, including entitlement, merit, need, and equality. The studied communities distribute PES benefits by providing differentiated compensation to diverse groups of landholders via private cash payments, whilst also attending non-landed community members through public infrastructure investments. We show that benefit-sharing is strongly influenced by pre-existing land tenure features and associated norms, which in the study area include three different types of individual and common-property. Yet, we also show that communities continuously adjust benefit-sharing arrangements to navigate distributional challenges emerging from programme engagement. Overall, we provide novel insights on the evolution, diversity, and complexity of distributive justice in community-based PES and we advocate for a context-sensitive, nuanced, and dynamic account of justice in incentive-based conservation.

In this chapter, we draw on existing varieties of environmentalism, and particularly on Martínez-Alier’s powerful concept of the environmentalism of the poor, to bring forward the idea of “the environmentalism of the paid” as a rising though unexpected consequence of the emergence of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a conservation policy. The environmentalism of the paid emphasizes the positive role that conservation payments can bring to local livelihoods; connects very different types of stakeholders from local to global contexts through a single exchange value that nonetheless acquires different local meanings and values; and counts with strong allies who promote and make PES possible through cross-scale institutionalization processes. In bringing forward the notion of the environmentalism of the paid, we reflect on how it aligns with or contradicts old and new forms of environmental thought and practice.

No abstract

No abstract