Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are one prominent strategy to address economic externalities of resource extraction and commodity production, improving both social and ecological outcomes. But do PES and related incentive programs achieve that lofty goal? Along with considerable enthusiasm, PES has faced a wide range of substantial critiques. In this paper, we characterize seven major classes of concerns associated with common PES designs, and use these as inspiration to consider potential avenues for improvements in PES outcomes and uptake. The problems include (1) new externalities, (2) misplacement of rights and responsibilities, (3) crowding out existing motivations, (4) efficiency-equity tradeoffs, (5) monitoring costs, (6) limited applicability, and (7) top-down prescription/alienating agency. As currently practiced, many PES programs are thus of limited benefit and even potentially detrimental to sustainability. From this dire conclusion, we highlight several innovations that might be combined and extended in a novel approach to PES that may address all seven problems. Recognizing that PES necessarily articulate and even normalize values, our proposed approach entails designing these institutions intentionally to articulate rights and responsibilities conducive to sustainability-those we might collectively seek to entrench. Problems remain, and new ones may arise, but the proposed approach may offer a way to reimagine PES as a major social and economic tool for enabling sustainable relationships with nature, conserving and restoring ecosystems and their benefits for people now and in the future.

Optimists contend that crowdfunding, in which project backers use online campaigns to assemble numerous small donations, can democratize access to finance, but there are legitimate concerns that this funding approach remains discriminatory. Drawing on recent readings emphasizing the geographic components of Bourdieu’s field theory, we argue the relationship between crowdfunding teams’ resources and crowdfunding success is mediated by spatial capital—the ability to draw capital from other social spaces due to geographic context. We use logistic regressions predicting success rates for 134,098 campaigns launched in the USA on the Indiegogo platform between 2009 and 2015, combined with other spatial data, to model the relationship between spatial capital and other success predictors. Our models suggest spatial context mediates the relationship between resources and success. Rural areas, in particular, have lower success rates than urban areas, and affluent areas have the highest success rates. Given that only around 10% of Indiegogo campaigns are fully funded, spatial inequalities place significant limits on who can benefit from crowdfunding campaigns, suggesting crowdfunding may not democratize access to finance, as optimists hope.

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Transnational sustainable development efforts often follow a project-based approach, in which funding sources, whether donor agencies, foundations, or firms, sponsor specific development activities, generally undertaken by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or social enterprises