A Revised Conceptual Framework for Payments for Environmental Services

By Matthew Sommerville, Julia P. G. Jones, E. Milner‐Gulland. 2009

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the past decade, "Payments for Environmental Services" (PES) have received a great deal of attention as a natural-resource management approach. We propose a revised definition and framework for PES implementation that focuses on the use of positive incentives as the philosophy behind PES and conditionality as the method for influencing behaviors. We note the importance of additionality of PES interventions to justify their value in a wider context. Finally, we highlight the need to understand the local institutional context in terms of the characteristics of buyers, sellers, and their relationship for implementation to be effective. Our framework acts as a platform to begin examining how the variety of options for structuring PES projects can be adapted to a range of existing institutional contexts.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2101fd2563c29b5974670f32c4402e3d3c6dc364

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Citations in the corpus

Payments for Ecosystem Services: Rife With Problems and Potential—For Transformation Towards Sustainability (2017, background): “Furthermore, PES payments can, if unchecked, lead to further perverse incentives when those who do not qualify to participate in a given program engage in undesirable activities, like deforestation, in order to be eligible for the PES program (Sommerville et al., 2009; Wunder et al., 2008).”
Redefining payments for environmental services (2012, background): “Although it may be difficult to assess additionality precisely (Sommerville et al., 2009), and it does not seem to be present to a significant extent in ongoing PES schemes (Pattanayak et al., 2010), it should be considered in the design of PES schemes tominimize the likelihood of wasting scarce…”
The Devil in the Detail: A Practical Guide on Designing Payments for Environmental Services (2016, background): “First, the majority of the studies on the behavioral economics of PES focus very broadly on the comparison of no payment to payment (Sommerville et al., 2009; Travers et al., 2011; Reichhuber et al., 2009; Van Hecken and Bastiaensen, 2010; Garcia Amado et al., 2011, 2013; Greiner and Gregg, 2011;…”
Revisiting the concept of payments for environmental services (2015, background): “Similarly, Sommerville et al. (2009) characterize PES as an umbrella term for a set of resource-management tools based on the philosophy of implementing conditional positive incentives.”
Payments for ecosystem services: A review and comparison of developing and industrialized countries (2013, background): “Hardly any direct links were made between PES research in industrialized and developing countries, and if so only on a very theoretical level (Jack et al., 2008; Sommerville et al., 2009).”
The Different Dimensions of Livelihood Impacts of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) Schemes: A Systematic Review (2018, background): “Other mainstreamed definitions rely on the incremental provision of environmental services (Sommerville et al., 2009; Tacconi, 2012) or on incentives to align individual/collective land-use decisions and social interest by transferring resources between social actors (Muradian et al.”
A place-based approach to payments for ecosystem services (2017, background): “…to individuals or communities to voluntarily adopt behaviours that are not legally obliged, and which improve the provision of well-defined and quantifiable ecosystem services that it would otherwise have been economically unviable to provide (Sommerville et al., 2009; Muradian et al., 2013).”
Why do farmers join Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes? An Assessment of PES water scheme participation in Brazil (2014, background): “The previously predominant view of PES as a market-based Coasean solution (Wunder, 2005) has been increasingly challenged by institutional economists (Vatn, 2010) who suggest alternative conceptual frameworks that pay more attention to, for example, aspects of conditionality and positive incentive t”