Abstract:As payment for environmental services (PES) initiatives spread to collectively managed natural resources, questions arise because the incentive structures that might be appropriate for individually managed resources will not necessarily promote the collective action required to manage the commons. Theory suggests challenges for cash payments to promote collective action, and for alternative payment types to facilitate conditionality. Possible ways to reconcile this disconnect involve conceiving of PES more broadly through the use of multiple forms of payment including non-cash incentives and placing greater focus on building institutions for collective action than on strict conditionality.

Payments for environmental services (PES), the non-provisioning part of ecosystem services, target alignment of microeconomic incentives for land users with meso- and macroeconomic societal costs and benefits of their choices across stakeholders and scales. They can interfere with or complement social norms and rights-based approaches at generic (land-use planning) and individual (tenure, use rights) levels; they interact with macroeconomic policies influencing the drivers to which individual agents respond. In many developing country contexts, community scale factors strongly influence land users' decisions, whereas unclear land rights complicate the use of market-based instruments. PES concepts need to adapt. Multiple paradigms have emerged within the broad PES domain. Evidence suggests that forms of “coinvestment in stewardship” (CIS) alongside rights are the preferred entry point. Commodification of environmental services (ES) and ES markets might evolve later on, but require strong government regulation to set and enforce rules of the game. We frame hypotheses for wider testing and “no-regrets” recommendations for practitioners.

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Abstract:As payment for environmental services (PES) initiatives spread to collectively managed natural resources, questions arise because the incentive structures that might be appropriate for individually managed resources will not necessarily promote the collective action required to manage the commons. Theory suggests challenges for cash payments to promote collective action, and for alternative payment types to facilitate conditionality. Possible ways to reconcile this disconnect involve conceiving of PES more broadly through the use of multiple forms of payment including non-cash incentives and placing greater focus on building institutions for collective action than on strict conditionality.

The United Nations (UN) Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) program offers incentives for developing countries to reduce CO 2 emissions and to invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development. In designing and deploying REDD programs, the UN is asking that participating nations go beyond focusing just on technical issues associated with carbon management and also include a range of social considerations; for example, program managers are being asked to undertake stakeholder-based processes aimed at incorporating community concerns in program design, implementation, and management. The research reported here discussed the application of structured decision making to the design of REDD programs in Vietnam. The goal of structured decision making is to place the values, objectives, and concerns of stakeholders squarely in front of managers so that they may lend maximum insight to decisions that require trade-offs across environmental management options.