There is growing interest on payments for ecosystem services (PES) in developing countries including the Philippines. Watersheds have been degraded through deforestation and subsequent conversion to other land cover, principally for agriculture. In the last decade, several Payments for Watershed Services schemes have been implemented and this paper is an attempt to assess the form of incentives or rewards that have been provided to upland communities in a number of sites under different management leadership in the Philippines. We reviewed four cases specifically related to watershed services in the: 1) Bakun Watershed, 2) Maasin Watershed, 3) Sibuyan Watershed, and 4) Baticulan Watershed. The case studies of varying stages of implementation has shown that the chances of success of PES schemes in promoting watershed conservation and rehabilitation as well as in improving the livelihoods of upland communities is constrained by incomplete information and knowledge about the interaction between ecosystem properties and provision of services, and the difficulty in establishing voluntary participation and conditionality of payments. In this paper, we argued that institutions may enable or hinder the successful implementation of PES. The role of the local government as intermediaries is crucial in the process of establishing PES more particularly in the information dissemination and education of the key stakeholders. The case studies also showed how PES programs are reinforced by the presence of non-government organizations.

Enhancing sustainability in food production requires knowledge about the economic, environmental and social performance of the various stages of agri-food supply chains. An integrated indicator can provide synthetized information about the extent to which food products are sustainably produced and can guide sustainability improvements. The overall objective of this thesis was to perform integrated assessments of relative sustainability performance of (stages of) agri-food supply chains using integrated indicators. To achieve the overall objective this thesis first The results of this thesis suggests that the three proposed integrated indicators can be used in different socio-economic and environmental contexts to capture the multidimensional nature of relative agri-food supply chain sustainability. Their implementation helps to overcome some of the limitations of the single-issue and composite indicators that are commonly used in sustainability assessments such as incommensurability, subjectivity and comparability. The indicators provide information that can be used by businesses, stakeholders and policy makers to identify opportunities for relative sustainability performance improvements of agrifood supply chains.