Fresh tracks in the forest: assessing incipient payments for environmental services initiatives in Bolivia

By N. Robertson, Sven Wunder. 2005

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are being considered worldwide with great interest and expectation. Proposals to create agreements in which beneficiaries of environmental services pay landowners directly for the provision or protection of these services are innovative and promising. But what real PES experiences are actually out there? This work assesses a range of PES or PES-type experiences in one country, Bolivia, in the fields of carbon sequestration, protection of watershed services, biodiversity and aesthetic landscape values. The report concludes that while none of the generally young initiatives adhere fully to the principle of PES as developed in the theoretical literature, many experiment with some of the relevant PES mechanisms. Protection of watersheds and landscape values are the most common types, though the implementing intermediaries often have underlying biodiversity-protection goals. Main obstacles to PES implementation include ideological resistance against the PES concept, the difficulty of building trust between buyers and sellers, and limited willingness to pay on behalf of service users. During their relatively short lifetime, basically all initiatives had been successful in making service sellers (PES recipients) better off in economic terms, while the effectiveness in achieving environmental objectives and securing positive social impacts so far remained more variable. In some cases, redesigning these initiatives to bring them closer to the full PES principles could also enable them to more effectively achieve positive environmental and livelihood outcomes.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b9ae1d88c84918210b4d19ee28bfd4663e75269

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Citations in the corpus

Targeting and implementing payments for ecosystem services: Opportunities for bundling biodiversity conservation with carbon and water services in Madagascar (2010, background): “Bundling can be advantageous for those interested in biodiversity conservation because biodiversity is often harder than many other services to monetize and thus more difficult to get local and global beneficiaries to pay for directly (Chomitz et al., 1999; Heal, 2002; Robertson and Wunder, 2005).”
Selling two environmental services: In-kind payments for bird habitat and watershed protection in Los Negros, Bolivia (2008, background): “As noted by Robertson and Wunder (2005): “In terms of land-use change, the land currently put under conservation contracts is not themost threatenedby agricultural clearing, if it is indanger at all”.”
Designing payments for ecosystem services: Lessons from previous experience with incentive-based mechanisms (2008, background): “For example, some PES projects in Bolivia met with opposition both from those who saw them as limiting future economic development and from those who saw them as a privatization of nature (8).”
Payments for environmental services: some nuts and bolts (2005, methodology): “In our assessment of two countries, Bolivia and Vietnam, no single scheme satisfi ed all fi ve criteria, although several satisfi ed more than one (Robertson and Wunder 2005; Wunder, The, and Ibarra 2005).”
Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: An overview of the issues (2008, background): “Leakage (sometimes also called spillage) refers to the inadvertent displacement of activities damaging environmental service provision to areas outside the geographical zone of PES intervention (Robertson and Wunder, 2005).”
Payments for environmental services and the poor: concepts and preliminary evidence (2008, background): “8 Based on 2003 tourism income figures (net cash profits and intra-community wages) for La Chonta, Mapajo, Chalalán and Reserva Eduardo Avaroa operations (Robertson and Wunder, 2005).”
Compensation and Rewards for Environmental Services in the Developing World: Framing Pan-Tropical Analysis and Comparison (2009, background): “However, in their review of ‘PES-like’ schemes in Bolivia, Robertson and Wunder (2005) found some evidence that the schemes were contributing to the well-being of poor people and no evidence of the schemes damaging the poor.”
A Revised Conceptual Framework for Payments for Environmental Services (2009, background): “…nature of an agreement has been used as a defining characteristic of PES interventions, this criterion is frequently not met in interventions commonly considered as PES (Robertson and Wunder 2005) and there are many examples where payments are used to alter behaviors that are already illegal.”
The CAMPFIRE programme in Zimbabwe: payments for wildlife services (2008, background): “This definition, however, excludesmany of the current innovative approaches being developed under looser notions of PES (see Robertson and Wunder, 2005).”
All That Glitters: A Review of Payments for Watershed Services in Developing Countries (2009, background): “A clear example of this is in Tarija, Bolivia, where despite evidence of downstream willingness to pay for watershed conservation, the NGO promoting the scheme decided not to pursue a the option of an additional user charge because of concerns about its political feasibility (Robertson and Wunder 20”
Moving ahead with REDD: issues, options and implications (2008, background): “For example, the Noel Kempff Mercado Park in Bolivia, which is one of the few examples of a voluntary REDD scheme, has consolidated forest fragments into more ecologically coherent units despite concerns about leakage beyond its boundaries (Robertson and Wunder 2005).”
The Efficiency of Payments for Environmental Services in Tropical Conservation (2007, methodology): “In our thorough assessment of two countries, Bolivia (Robertson & Wunder 2005) and Vietnam (Wunder et al. 2005), no single scheme satisfied all criteria, but several were PES-like schemes.”