The Devil in the Detail: A Practical Guide on Designing Payments for Environmental Services

By S. Engel. 2016

222 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Payments for environmental services (PES) have become a popular approach to address environmental degradation. However, evidence on its effectiveness is scarce and rather mixed. PES is not a panacea, but there are many cases where PES can be a promising tool. Yet, poor PES design translates into poor performance of the instrument. PES design is a complex task; the devil is in the detail of a number of PES design features. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance in dealing with this complexity through a comprehensive review of PES design that is accessible to both academics and practitioners. Practitioner guidelines on deciding whether PES is the best approach and for selecting among alternative design features are presented. PES design has to start from a careful understanding of the specific ecological and socio-economic context. We now know a lot about which design features are best suited to which context. It is time to put these insights into practice.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbef73a0022bfceb74a05e746f31366a87facbd7

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Citations in the corpus

Payments for Environmental Services and Motivation Crowding: Towards a Conceptual Framework (2019, background): “…has been a rather “messy” endeavour, in which the sociopolitical and cultural complexities of the countries, territories and localities where PES have been implemented have taken central stage in its design and implementation (Muradian et al. 2013; Engel, 2016; Ezzine-de-Blas et al., 2016a).”
The Effectiveness of Payments for Environmental Services (2017, unknown): “Reducing information rents therefore requires differentiating payments to better match ES providers’ opportunity costs (Engel, 2016).”
Payments for Ecosystem Services: Rife With Problems and Potential—For Transformation Towards Sustainability (2017, background): “In many PES, governments have stepped forward with a Pigouvian solution (Engel, 2016) distributing funds from the public purse to protect public benefits.”