Steven Lawry
CGIAR SEMINAR SERIES
Payments for Ecosystem Services: Win-Win Solutions?
Co-organized by IFPRI, the CGIAR, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Session at Tropentag 2023
SEP 21, 2023 - 7:45 TO 9:15AM EDT
2. • REDD+/PES interventions in community forestry have performed poorly overall.
• Many forest communities know what they are doing but local management and stewardship systems are not
acknowledged in intervention design. Importance of social goals is lauded, but the roles of local social institutions and
priorities are largely overlooked or discounted by REDD+ and PES planners.
• Many communities (though not all) manage complex socio-ecological systems for multiple purposes: timber and NTFPs;
water regulation and agricultural sustainability; biodiversity; cultural identity and social solidarity. Successful
stewardship is based on an ethic of care, intrinsic knowledge of context, and agency (full exercise of which is dependent
on secure rights).
• Where good stewardship-based outcomes are already present, the carbon balance may be socially and ecologically
“optimal” and accommodating forest management and payments regimes for carbon additionality may be disruptive.
• The additionality principle rewards “deforesters” while excluding conservers; perceived by many as socially
unacceptable.
• Lack of local market-facing institutions emboldens rent-seeking intermediaries. De jure state ownership of forest land
positions governments for payment capture.
• Where communities manage wholistically, with proven beneficial social and ecological outcomes, Investments
enhancing social and environmental well-being may be preferred to PES. PES incentives may be appropriate for
”deforesters” but more sophisticated understanding of local context and deforestation drivers is needed.
The argument summarized
3. • Failure to account for deforestation drivers in project design. “REDD+ institutionalization [in Indonesia] has focused
mostly on technical aspects, thereby diverting the focus from addressing socioeconomic and political drivers of
deforestation and forest degradation. [T]ransformational change in the forestry and broader land-use sector is still
elusive.” Nofyanza et al (2020).
• Social and income benefits fall short. “The study [of 4,000 households in 148 villages participating in 22 REDD+
programs in 6 countries] finds that REDD+ has not contributed significantly to perceived well-being and income
sufficiency, in spite of the fact that most households have not only engaged with REDD+ interventions but view them
favorably.” Sunderlin, William D., et al. (2017)
• Evidence of limited (and overstated) reduced deforestation. A study of 26 [Verra managed]carbon payment projects
on three continents found that, “most projects have not significantly reduced deforestation. For projects that did,
reductions were substantially lower than claimed. This reflects differences between project ex ante baselines and ex
post counterfactuals according to observed deforestation in control areas.” West, T. (2023).
• Low additionality explained?: Socially unacceptable to reward deforesters while excluding conservers. “Several
studies found that the PES projects achieved low additionality. It was hard or not socially desirable to enroll only those
participants who would deforest their patch of land with high certainty in the absence of payments, in other words,
some payments were given to people who would have not deforested their land anyway.” Burivalova et al., (2019)
PES performance in community forestry
5. • Confronting biases and supporting local problem-solving
Communities know what they are doing; local management a model of democratic
land use. Local user values, aims, and priorities should be supported. Communities
manage forests; governments can’t and markets disrupt (Yulani, et al., (2022);
Hajjar, et al. (2021)
• Re-engineer payment regimes to reward conservers.
Investments in social well-being enhance ecological outcomes, and vice-versa.
Pena, et al., (2016)
• Rights recognition catalyzes internal and external investment.
Donors can support investment readiness post-tenure reform. Baynes, et al.,
(2015); Gynch, et al., (2020)
Policy reforms and investment alternatives