The Devil in the Detail: A Practical Guide on Designing Payments for Environmental Services

Abstract

Payments for environmental services (PES) have become a popular approach to address environmental degradation. However, evidence on its effectiveness is scarce and rather mixed. PES is not a panacea, but there are many cases where PES can be a promising tool. Yet, poor PES design translates into poor performance of the instrument. PES design is a complex task; the devil is in the detail of a number of PES design features. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance in dealing with this complexity through a comprehensive review of PES design that is accessible to both academics and practitioners. Practitioner guidelines on deciding whether PES is the best approach and for selecting among alternative design features are presented. PES design has to start from a careful understanding of the specific ecological and socioeconomic context. We now know a lot about which design features are best suited to which context. It is time to put these insights into practice. * This paper has emerged from preparing a series of keynote presentations on PES design over the past few years. I thank the participants of these presentations for their questions and feedback. Thanks also to Elisabeth Gsottbauer, Estelle Midler, Sven

Effectiveness and equity of Payments for Ecosystem Services: Real-effort experiments with Vietnamese land users

“…which, however, is globally not (yet) widely practiced (Engel, 2016;Wunder et al, 572 2018), despite its apparent contribution to positive ecological outcomes of PES (Ezzine- …”

REDD+ in Theory and Practice: How Lessons From Local Projects Can Inform Jurisdictional Approaches

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Payments for Ecosystem Services: Rife With Problems and Potential—For Transformation Towards Sustainability

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