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ABSTRACTThe 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.

AbstractChoice models and a referendum format contingent valuation survey are used to investigate household preferences for improved water services and decentralization levels (actual departmental administration vs. further decentralization to the municipality) in urban Matiguás, Nicaragua. Choice models suggest that households prefer the current departmental administration over municipal provision for service and capacity, but believe that the municipality would be more interested in improving services. Results also indicate that households are willing to pay an increment of at least 112 per cent above their current monthly water bill for reliable and safe drinking water services, regardless of administration type.

ABSTRACTPayments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic instrument for more 'rational', effective and efficient environmental policy or by their critics as an exogenously imposed conduit of hegemonic neoliberalism. This introductory article to the special issue that follows advocates for and demonstrates a more grounded and historically situated approach for understanding the conformation and outcomes of PES in actual practice. It proposes a framework for examining individual PES initiatives as shaped by dynamic interactions between imposed structure and the development pathways and situated agency of actors in the territories in which they are implemented. It finds that certain ubiquitous components of this approach — the valuation of nature, the creation of institutions and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits — provide potential openings for articulation and engagement that can allow these initiatives to be contested, adapted, hybridized or more fully co‐opted and captured. This framework opens a pathway for more inclusive, nuanced and grounded research on PES and on market‐based environment and development policies more broadly.

ABSTRACTPayments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is a well‐established conservation policy approach worldwide. Where forests are owned and managed by rural and indigenous communities, PES initiatives often aim to incentivize the joint adoption of forest protection and sustainable management practices. However, not all communities might have the will or capacity to maintain such practices over the long term. This article examines a PES programme in a rural community of Chiapas, Mexico. It shows that while a majority of the community's landowners have engaged in PES through two distinct working groups, a large share of the community forests remain outside the PES programme, and many landowners resist the extension of PES rules to non‐targeted forests. The authors argue 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. This accommodation, however, has ignited social conflict, reified tenure inequalities, and failed to strengthen local institutions to enable them to legitimately deal with the contested interests that underpin the fate of community forests. This article shows the limits of PES when parachuted into a context of uneven land tenure, weak collective action and contested leaderships.

Authoritarian and populist regimes have used the coronavirus pandemic as another excuse to further push back on democracy. Through the lens of boundary-making, we discuss power processes in pandemic politics of three countries whose governments and power constellations rely on authoritarian and/or populist politics (Hungary, Nicaragua, and Guatemala). Our aim is to envision the conceptual and practical possibilities for breaking up the unhealthy love relationship amid pandemic politics, authoritarianism, and populism, and for ultimately dismantling all three. On the basis of secondary data, personal communications, and our lived experiences, we analyze pandemic politics in authoritarian and populist contexts, exploring their ambiguous and co-constitutive effects through three apparent contradictions. First, we discuss control, or the ways in which the framing of the pandemic by authoritarian and populist regimes as an emergency, a quasi-war situation, or an excuse for political opportunism entails an attempt to justify command-and-control policies upon public behavior, intimate daily life, and subject classification. However, these control measures also bring about contestation through self-quarantine calls, accountability-driven demands of epidemiological data, and/or counter-narratives. Second, we engage with the contradiction of knowledge, by pointing out how authoritarian knowledge politics regarding the pandemic are based on over-centralized decision-making processes, manipulation of epidemiological data, and the silencing of unauthorized voices. Simultaneously, these measures are challenged and resisted by counter-knowledge alternatives on pandemic data and the struggles for subaltern forms of knowledge that could make relevant contributions to public health. Third, we discuss the contradiction of subjectivation processes. Authoritarian regimes make extraordinary efforts to draw a line between those bodies and subjects that deserve state protection and those that do not. In this situation, multiple forms of exclusion intersect and are reinforced based on ethnic, political, national, and gender differences. The manipulation of emotions is crucial in these divisions, often creating "worthy" and "unworthy" subjects. This highlights interconnectedness among vulnerabilities and emphasizes how care and solidarity are important elements in defying authoritarian populism. Finally, we conclude by proposing strategies that would allow political ecology to support prospects of emancipation for social justice, desperately needed in a pandemic-prone foreseeable future.

The green economy is proposed as a solution to address growing and potentially irreversible ecological crises. But what happens when environmental solutions are premised on the same logics of brutal simplification and dehumanization that sustain and reinforce systems of oppression and ecological breakdown? In this article, we describe the transformation of the biophysical landscape of the planet into replicable blueprints of the plantation plot. The plantation as a colonial-era organizational template is an ongoing ecological process premised on disciplining bodies and landscapes into efficient, predictable, calculable, and controllable plots to optimize commodity production and is dependent on racialized and gendered processes of dehumanization. The visible cultural, physical, aesthetic, and political singularity of the plot, under the guise of objectivity and neutrality, permits a tangible depiction of the way ecological breakdown takes place. We interrogate the notion of "greening" as a strategy to combat the unintended impacts of colonial plantation ecology, arguing that such tactics further reinforce the template of plantation ecology rather than dismantle it. We first conceptualize the historical plantation and its biophysical, cognitive, and corporeal organizational principles. We then offer examples of "greening" as new, more inclusive (but equally detrimental) forms of plantation logics, and crucially identify how these extensions of plantation logic get co-opted by resistance agents, from social movements to disease and pestilence. We consider sustainability certifications of palm oil through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Colombia and compensatory afforestation programs designed to offset forest destruction through monoculture plantations in India. We conclude by highlighting how abolition ecologies can serve as an antidote to plantation logic and highlight necessary relationships of self-reflexivity, repair and collective solidarity required to disinvest in plantation ecology.

In this commentary we respond to Fletcher and Büscher's (2017) recent article in this journal on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) as neoliberal 'conceit'. The authors claim that focusing attention on the micro-politics of PES design and implementation fails to expose an underlying neoliberal governmentality, and therefore only reinforces neoliberal capitalism as both the problem and solution of ecological crises. In response, we argue that a focus on the actions of local actors is key to understanding how and why such governmentality fails or succeeds in performing as theorized. Grand generalizations fixated on a particular hegemonic and neoliberal PES ontology overlook how actors intertwine theory and practice in ways which cannot be explained by a dominant structural theory. Such generalizations risk obscuring the complexity and situational history, practice and scale of the processes involved. Rather than relegating variegated and hybrid forms of what actually emerges from PES interventions as neoliberal conceit, we argue that an actor-oriented, 'weak theory' approach permits PES praxis to inform knowledge generation. This would open up a more inclusive and politically engaging space for thinking about and realizing political change.