Suchergebnisse

Programs of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) have been widely adopted in conservation policies as incentives to reduce deforestation. In developing countries, conditional payments contribute to re-regulate land-use change in a context of costly and conflictive law enforcement. Due to the heterogeneity of implementation contexts, the role of technical intermediaries able to translate complex program rules into grounded forest management plan appears critical. For example, in Mexico, certified independent intermediaries have a major role in the selection, the training and the monitoring of participant forest-owners to governmental PES programs. We performed semi-structured interviews with the majority (21) of technical intermediaries in charge of helping PES participation in the state of Chiapas. The interviews aimed at identifying a typology of practices regarding program implementation with private and collective forest owners but also understanding how intermediaries have adapted to evolving procedural rules. Our results suggest that several intermediaries can use PES to promote their own agenda, especially if they are backed by development or conservation NGOs. However, the number of intermediaries has decreased over the year as a result of stricter program rules that control their remuneration and a declining budget for PES programs. Remaining intermediaries have developed strategies in order to maintain their position and anticipate changes in program rules. Overall, our results contribute to document the institutional void existing between policy design and implementation by highlighting the use of expertise and networks by intermediaries in order to remain key players in the governance of PES.

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.

We assess the additional forest cover protected by 13 rural communities located in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, as a result of the economic incentives received through the country's national program of payments for biodiversity conservation. We use spatially explicit data at the intra-community level to define a credible counterfactual of conservation outcomes.We use covariate-matching specifications associated with spatially explicit variables and difference-in-difference estimators to determine the treatment effect. We estimate that the additional conservation represents between 12 and 14.7 percent of forest area enrolled in the program in comparison to control areas. Despite this high degree of additionality, we also observe lack of compliance in some plots participating in the PES program. This lack of compliance casts doubt on the ability of payments alone to guarantee long-term additionality in context of high deforestation rates, even with an augmented program budget or extension of participation to communities not yet enrolled.