Can Financial Incentives Change Farmers' Motivations? An Agrarian System Approach to Development Pathways at the Nicaraguan Agricultural Frontier

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

“…We advocate for recognizing the territories in which PES are implemented as complex and dynamic systems, co-produced by the interaction of human activity and natural processes and inevitably influenced by historically built and evolving rules and norms, livelihood strategies, culture and worldviews, and underpinned by state policies, markets and changing environmental conditions (Bastiaensen et al, 2015;Berbés-Blázquez et al, 2016;Wegner, 2016). In particular, it is crucial to be aware of how current social-natural contexts and conditions reflect culturally and historically shaped practices about 'the right way of doing things' (Cleaver, 2012) which circulate within social networks and give rise to specific 'rules' leading to particular relational patterns (Van Hecken et al, 2019). This leads to an awareness that the present state of a given territory, locality or community depends on historical trajectories and on choices made at critical junctures in the past (Cleaver, 2012).…”

“…In taking this approach to researching PES, it is key to understand these pathways as constantly evolving: actor groups continuously co-construct the human and natural territories they belong to and impact the processes that define development pathways by reproducing, reworking, contesting and renegotiating rules as well as maintaining or changing their social networks (Van Hecken et al, 2019). It is therefore vital to account for the ways in which PES practices shape and are shaped by these particular pathways, particularly in how these influence the ways in which different actors are able 'to benefit from things' (Ribot and Peluso, 2003: 153), inevitably involving winners and losers, depending on actors' ability to sway others to their own views through the use of power, resources, knowledge and voice (Bastiaensen et al, 2015).…”

In-kind conservation payments crowd in environmental values and increase support for government intervention: A randomized trial in Bolivia

“…A blossoming literature has explored the psychological impact of PES, and PES-like, programs on individuals, through their motivations, values, beliefs and internalized norms, with few consistent results. This literature has included a range of methods including ethnographic analyses (Bose, Garcia & Vira 2019, Van Hecken et al 2019 There is substantial interest in the use of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in conservation (Ferraro & Pattanayak 2006, Bayliss et al 2015, where units are randomly allocated to receive an intervention or not, as a robust method of impact evaluation (Banerjee & Duflo 2009). RCTs overcome many of the challenges of other approaches to allow causal inference (the ability to conclude that the intervention resulted in the result observed).…”

Silencing Agency in Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) by Essentializing a Neoliberal ‘Monster’ Into Being: A Response to Fletcher & Büscher's ‘PES Conceit’

“…Consequently, the PES project diverged to become instead a collective action arrangement in which the traditional unpaid voluntary 'work days', coordinated by local leaders of water user associations, replaced 'payments' for water-resource management. Similar cases that examine the grounded and intimate ways in which local actors imbue the intent and motives of these initiatives with their own meanings, sociocultural institutions and value systems have been documented with indigenousled forest-based carbon offsetting in Mexico (Osborne and ShapiroGarza, 2017), REDD + in Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines (Mahanty et al, 2012), small-scale PES programs in peasant communities in Nicaragua (Van Hecken and Bastiaensen, 2010;Van Hecken et al, 2017), and in fishery communities in Japan (Ishihara et al, 2017), the national forest PES program of Vietnam (McElwee, 2012;McElwee et al, 2014), and the national PES program of Mexico (Shapiro-Garza, 2013a).…”