Policy instruments targeting environmental, social, and economic sustainability cover both local and global geographies and stem from both the public and private sectors. These policy instruments do not work in silos but interact throughout the regulatory process. In this paper we discuss interactions between public regulations and private certification that affect how forests are managed in three tropical countries: Indonesia, Cameroon, and Peru. We show how the governance regime in each of the countries has evolved in response to environmental and social issues. We focus on the Forest Stewardship Council's forest stewardship certification as it is the main global certification scheme in the tropical region and look at its role in attaining sustainability in timber production.Case study results from Indonesia, Cameroon, and Peru indicate that certification influences all stages of the policy process: agenda setting and negotiation; implementation, and monitoring and enforcement. Results also suggest that certification introduces positive changes in management practices and improves social and environmental performance. However, its influence in attaining broader-scale sustainability is limited by a low level of uptake, notably in tropical countries where the costs of getting certified and maintaining certification are high and the certification criteria are rather complex, as well as by some of its inherent characteristics, as it can only solve problems at the forest management unit level. ARTICLE HISTORY

We estimate the effects of Peru’s oldest watershed payments for environmental services (PES) initiative in Moyobamba (Andes–Amazon transition zone) and disentangle the complex intervention into its two main forest conservation treatments. First, a state-managed protected area (PA) was established, allowing sustainable use but drastically limiting de facto land use and land rights of households in the upper watershed through command-and-control interventions. Second, a subset of those environmentally regulated households also received incentives: PES-like voluntary contracts with conditional in-kind rewards, combined with access to participation in sustainable income-generating activities of the integrated conservation and development project (ICDP) type. To evaluate impacts, we perform matching procedures and adjustment regressions to obtain the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of each intervention. We investigate impacts on plot-level forest cover and household welfare for the period 2010–2016. We find that both treatments—command-and-control restrictions and the incentive package—modestly but significantly mitigated primary forest loss. Incentive-induced conservation gains came at elevated per-hectare implementation costs. We also find positive effects on incentive-treated households’ incomes and assets; however, their self-perceived wellbeing counterintuitively declined. We hypothesise that locally frustrated beneficiary expectations vis-a-vis the ambitiously designed PES-cum-ICDP intervention help explain this surprising finding. We finalise with some recommendations for watershed incentives and policy mix design in Moyobamba and beyond.

An ecosystem is healthy if it is active, maintains its organization and autonomy over time, and is resilient to stress. Healthy ecosystems provide human well‐being via ecosystem services, which are produced in interaction with human, social, and built capital. These services are affected by different ecosystem stewardship schemes. Therefore, society should be aiming for ecosystem health stewardship at all levels to maintain and improve ecosystem services. We review the relationship between ecosystem health and ecosystem services, based on a logic chain framework starting with (1) a development or conservation policy, (2) a management decision or origin of the driver of change, (3) the driver of change itself, (4) the change in ecosystem health, (5) the change in the provision of ecosystem services, and (6) the change in their value to humans. We review two case studies to demonstrate the application of this framework. We analyzed 6,131 records from the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD) and found that in approximately 58% of the records data on ecosystem health were lacking. Finally, we describe how the United Nations' System of Environmental‐Economic Accounting (SEEA) incorporates ecosystem health as part of efforts to account for natural capital appreciation or depreciation at the national level. We also provide recommendations for improving this system.

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