Abstract
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has become a dominant paradigm in international environmental and climate policies. The approach looks appealing: land users, often poorly motivated to protect nature and the benefits we obtain from it (the so-called 'ecosystem services'), may be incited to do so through conditional payments from interested consumers/buyers (e.g. carbon-constrained electricity companies paying for forest conservation). PES schemes also tend to be hailed as attractive tools for rural poverty alleviation in the Global South. The idea of conditional 'green' payments is clearly reflected in international climate finance instruments such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol, voluntary and compulsory carbon markets, and the UN global programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+, included in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord). All of these can be conceptualised as global PES mechanisms. Despite their increasing popularity among donors and governments, evidence regarding the environmental and social outcomes of PES projects is not unequivocal. Indeed, PES remains weakly theorized in socio-economic and political terms, resulting in a superficial understanding of how power relations and cultural diversity shape the social-ecological outcomes of these projects. Through the comparative analysis of at least two cases in Nicaragua and Guatemala, this research will further develop a novel methodology to address important analytical and empirical gaps in current PES scholarship. It also aims to study in greater depth how PES instruments succeed or fail to reshape nature-society relations and how they change resource use behaviour in socially and culturally diverse contexts. In this way, this research offers crucial policy-relevant insights into the ways in which global-to-local interactions reshape PES interventions, allowing to better fit local notions of value, justice and equity, while contributing to global ecological goals.
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