Payments for Ecosystem Services in Nicaragua: Do Market‐based Approaches Work?

Abstract

The concept of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is gaining increasing attention among scholars as well as conservation and development practitioners. The premises of this innovative conservation approach are appealing: private land users, usually poorly motivated to protect nature on their land, will do so if they receive payments from environmental service buyers which cover part of the land users' opportunity costs of developing the land. However, this article warns against an over-enthusiastic adoption of a one-sided market-based PES approach. Based on a field study of the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Approaches to Ecosystem Management Project (RISEMP), one of the main PES pilot projects in Nicaragua, it suggests that a mixture of economic and non-economic factors motivated farmers to adopt the envisaged silvopastoral practices and that the actual role of PES is mistakenly understood as a simple matter of financial incentives. The authors argue that PES approaches should be understood as a part of a broader process of local institutional transformation rather than as a market-based alternative for allegedly ineffective government and/or community governance. Development and Change 41(3): 421-444 (2010).

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).…”

Interactions between payments for hydrologic services, landowner decisions, and ecohydrological consequences: synergies and disconnection in the cloud forest zone of central Veracruz, Mexico

“…Highlighting the reasons why participants enroll in PHS programs besides financial incentives may also identify strategies to improve the design of PHS programs. A number of PHS studies have reported that payments received by participants are often below opportunity costs of alternative land use practices (Kosoy et al 2007, Muñoz-Piña et al 2008, Sommerville et al 2010, Van Hecken and Bastiaensen 2010. This finding is important because it highlights how PHS program participation is influenced by a variety of factors, including economic considerations (Pham et al 2009), social norms (Chen et al 2009, Newton et al 2012, and personal preferences (Kosoy et al 2008, Fisher 2012.…”

Long-Term Effects of Payments for Environmental Services: Combining Insights from Communication and Economics

“…With this narrow perspective it appears to have ignored or lost sight of lessons, unrelated to economic incentives, from earlier conservation programs. More recent literature on PES has addressed a number of problems that can result [12][13][14], including the problem of motivation crowding out [15][16][17].…”

“…The basic idea of motivation crowding is that humans are driven by multiple sources of motivation (e.g., intrinsic and extrinsic), and that extrinsic motivation, such as financial incentives, can interact with intrinsic motivation, such as social and personal motivators [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Incentives that undermine intrinsic sources of motivation can crowd-out the targeted behavior, while incentives that reinforce intrinsic sources of motivation can crowd it in.…”