Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico: Nature, Neoliberalism, Social Movements, and the State

By K. Mcafee, Elizabeth N. Shapiro. 2010

464 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prominent advocates of payments for ecosystem services (PES) contend that markets in biodiversity, carbon storage, and hydrological services can produce both conservation and sustainable development. In Mexico's national PES programs, however, conceived as models of market-based management, efficiency criteria have clashed with antipoverty goals and an enduring developmental-state legacy. Like other projects for commodification of nature, Mexico's PES is a hybrid of market-like mechanisms, state regulations, and subsidies. It has been further reshaped by social movements mobilized in opposition to neoliberal restructuring. These activists see ecosystem services as coproduced by nature and campesino communities. Rejecting the position of World Bank economists, they insist that the values of ecosystems derive less from the market prices of their services than from their contributions to peasant livelihoods, biodiversity, and social benefits that cannot be quantified or sold. These divergent conceptualizations reflect contrasting understandings of the roles of agriculture and of the state in sustainable development. The Mexican case exposes contradictions within neoliberal environmental discourse based on binary categories of nature and society. It suggests that conservation policies in the global South, if imposed from the North and framed by neoliberal logic, are likely to clash with state agendas and local development goals.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/899ad533574830419e8f011c710c1f5a81cf6302

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Citations in the corpus

Payments for Ecosystem Services: Rife With Problems and Potential—For Transformation Towards Sustainability (2017, background): “However, a substantial gap remains between these constructive suggestions for improving PES programs and the more fundamental critiques that have been levied against PES and market-based mechanisms more generally (Kosoy & Corbera, 2010; McAfee & Shapiro, 2010; Spash, 2008).”
Rethinking biodiversity: from goods and services to “living with” (2013, background): “Thus, despite the powerful win–win arguments that generally accompany the Ecosystem Services discourse, considering nature as a service or commodity will not automatically benefit ecosystems, species, or the poorest (Kosoy & Corbera 2010; McAfee & Shapiro 2010; Büscher et al. 2012).”
A political ecology of REDD+: property rights, militarised protectionism, and carbonised exclusion in Cross River (2016, background): “They are often limited, challenged and even transformed by community counter-claims (BeymerFarris and Bassett, 2012; Mahanty et al., 2012; McAfee and Shapiro, 2010).”
Between markets and hierarchies: The challenge of governing ecosystem services (2012, background): “McAfee and Shapiro (2010), for example, have analysed this negotiation process in the case of the Mexican nation-wide PES program for carbon and water-related ecosystem services.”
A Review of Ecosystem Services, Farmer Livelihoods, and Value Chains in Shade Coffee Agroecosystems (2011, background): “Two examples of existing ‘hybrid’ PES programs are Mexico’s ‘Payment for Ecological ServicesHydrological (PSA-H), and the ‘Program for the Development of Markets for the Ecosystem Services of Carbon Sequestration, the Derivatives of Biodiversity, and to Promote the Introduction and Improvement of Ag”
Payments for environmental services as neoliberal market-based forest conservation in Vietnam: Panacea or problem? (2012, background): “While the expansion of private buyers appears likely in the future, particularly for such commodities as forest carbon, to date many PES plans currently rely on government or hybrid buyers, such as Mexico and Costa Rica’s national programs (Chomitz et al., 1999; McAfee and Shapiro, 2010).”
Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of “Selling Nature to Save It” (2016, background): “Analysts have begun to argue that many if not most PES schemes fail to perform like actual markets (McAfee and Shapiro 2010; Fletcher and Breitling 2012; Milne and Adams 2012; Pirard 2012; Boisvert, M eral, and Froger 2013; Fletcher 2013; Lapeyre and Pirard 2013; Muradian et al. 2013; Muradian and…”
Market-oriented conservation governance: The particularities of place (2012, background): “always recognizable as neoliberal interventions when viewed from the ground (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010; McElwee, 2012).”
Examining equity: a multidimensional framework for assessing equity in payments for ecosystem services (2013, unknown): “…serve the interests of elites and intermediary organisations, while local actors lose access to significant livelihood resources without any significant benefits or influence over the terms of trade (Corbera and Brown, 2010; Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; McAfee and Shapiro, 2010; Pascual et al., 2010).”
Market mechanism or subsidy in disguise? Governing payment for environmental services in Costa Rica (2012, methodology): “…program administrators continue to pursue the elusive markets envisioned since the program’s inception – under pressure, as in Mexico’s PES program (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010), by international advisors from the World Bank and elsewhere to become increasingly neoliberal (Brockett and Gottfried,…”
Evaluating the outcomes of payments for ecosystem services programmes using a capital asset framework (2014, background): “…and a ‘commodity fiction’ (Gomez-Baggethun and Ruíz-Perez, 2011; Muradian and Rival, 2012; Robertson, 2012); and the perception that MBIs represent encroaching neo-liberalist interventions (McAfee and Shapiro, 2010; McElwee, 2012; Arsel and Büscher, 2012; McAfee, 2012; Shapiro-Garza, 2013).”
Market Masquerades: Uncovering the Politics of Community-level Payments for Environmental Services in Cambodia (2012, background): “For example, McAfee and Shapiro (2010) note that in Mexico, although national PES programmes were conceived of as market-based instruments, in practice they became hybrids of market-like mechanisms, state regulation and subsidies.”
The PES Conceit: Revisiting the Relationship between Payments for Environmental Services and Neoliberal Conservation (2017, background): “Some suggest introducing a distinction between programmes intended to provide a payment to incentivize preservation of ES that might not otherwise occur and those intended merely to ‘compensate’ providers for the services they already deliver anyway (CES rather than PES) (McAfee and Shapiro 2010; va”
Payments for ecosystem services and the fatal attraction of win‐win solutions (2013, background): “2011), but for others they constitute a good example of the “neoliberalization of nature” (McAfee and Shapiro 2010).”
Green economy and carbon markets for conservation and development: a critical view (2016, methodology): “Longer-term funding is less common in schemes that depend upon state, multilateral, or NGO subsidies, as do most PES programs (McAfee and Shapiro 2010).”