Kathryn Green
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sheffield Institute for International Development
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Sheffield Institute for International Development
Ecosystem Services are “the benefits people derive from ecosystems – the support of sustainable human well-being that ecosystems provide” (Costanza et al., 2014: 153). Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an approach based on a seemingly simple idea; society relies on the functions of the natural world, so making the value of such services explicit will help us to make better decisions about how to manage our natural capital sustainably. The simplicity of this idea has led to a good deal of discussion, extensive research on how to quantify such ecosystem services, and global initiatives to turn this idea into reality (see The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity). The idea that, for example, a community in a developing country could access financial reward for not removing or degrading an area of forest (see UN REDD+), bringing ‘win-win-win’ benefits for nature conservation, carbon sequestration and international development at the same time, is a simple and powerful one.
At the most recent Interdisciplinary Exchanges workshop on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), the idea of simplicity, and over-simplification was a theme that was touched on across the pre-workshop readings, the presentations and discussions on the day. Whilst I hold my hands up to the frustrating social science habit of replying that something is ‘more complicated than that’, my aim here is to explore three ways in which simplicity surrounds PES from both sides of the natural/social science divide:
1. A Simple Mechanism that Cannot Cope with the Complexity of Natural Systems
The first area of hidden complexity in PES relates to the natural world and how we understand it. As Adams (2014) recently outlined, there are many questions that present obstacles to the simplicity of the PES idea, and need to be answered in order to implement it successfully:
Firstly, PES relies on us having sufficient understanding of the complexity of ecosystems, of the different species and landscapes that make them up, and how these interact with one another, to be able to accurately identify the processes that underpin the ecosystem services that we are trying to protect and to predict the outcomes if certain alterations are made.
Secondly, the richness of our natural wealth means that an area of land may provide critical ecosystem services relating to hydrology, nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration and biodiversity at different levels and all at the same time, but the management decisions for each of these categories do not necessarily complement each other. Working out priorities at different scales within PES is therefore not easy: for example, which should take priority in PES projects, a local environmental service that secures water supply for small, rural communities in a developing country or carbon sequestration opportunities that can contribute to global efforts to combat climate change? Perhaps we can have both, but it is easy to see that both might not attract the same level of international interest, or funding. There is a politics to which ecosystem services are visible and perceived as important, just as there is a politics to nature conservation when the giant panda generates far more interest (and funding) than micro-organisms that might be critical to ecosystem function. But then who wants to sponsor a micro-organism?
2. Over-simplification of PES as Privatisation
The next area of over-simplification relates to a divide in perception and terminology between pro and anti PES academic camps. There has been a large literature critical of PES for the commodification of natural resources and privatisation that is envisaged. As speaker Mark Reed pointed out, this view is naive. As a researcher more familiar with the PES sceptic literature than the ins and outs of valuation and the economics of ecosystem services, I was intrigued by this counter-argument. Costanza et al. (2014) share this view that opponents have done much to argue against PES on the basis of inappropriate incorporation of market mechanisms and reification of privatisation. They argue that PES does not have to involve privatisation (and the criticisms of alienation and issues of power, tenure and access for deprived groups that this is often linked to). Similarly, Brockington (2010) makes the point that PES does not necessarily involve competitive markets, drawing on the example of the Norwegian government pledging to pay $250 million to the government of Guyana if they successful tackled deforestation (see here). Valuation of ecosystem services can be a useful tool to assist in management decision-making, and whilst in some cases this can involve market trading, it is well recognised amongst proponents that incentivising management through payments is not appropriate in all cases[1], and the decision to implement market mechanisms must be context-dependent (Costanza et al., 2014).
However, the idea that opposition to the valuation of ecosystem services is based on assumptions of privatisation is itself an over-simplification. Whilst it is clear that privatisation is not a necessary component of PES, and commodification resulting in market trading is only one aspect of such an approach, Costanza et al.’s (2014) claim that valuation does not necessarily involve commodification seems to miss the point that commodification is not simply about market trading. Yes, it is about “creating new things out of nature that can be sold” (Brockington, 2010: 367), but it is also about changing the value and understanding of natural resources and ecosystem services. It represents a shift in nature-society relations that conceptualises the natural world in financial terms, and whilst this can help to put nature conservation objectives on a level playing field with other priorities, and to make environmental arguments visible and legitimate in the global economy, it is an important shift in how we perceive the natural world, the ways in which we use it and how decisions should be made about it.
3. Over-simplification of Views of the Community
The final aspect of simplification that I discuss here is that surrounding local communities, and their role in PES. This is a prominent theme in the literature, and one that generated much discussion at the workshop. Whilst there is a large variety of PES schemes involving different actors at different levels, much of the promise for international development is linked to schemes that, similar to community-based approaches to conservation, involve participation by local actors and facilitate the accrual of benefits at the local level to incentivise sustainable management and assist in poverty reduction. There is a long history of research into such approaches across the world, however, and the outlook is mixed; the expected ‘win-win’ outcomes have often proved illusive, and patterns of benefit distribution are clearly tied to structures of inequality, wealth and power within and across communities. Accepting that there are winners and losers in such schemes, and trade-offs between objectives and stakeholders is vital to a realistic expectation of what PES does and what it will achieve. Equity, transparency and mutual benefit for all involved were described as the core pillars of PES by our speaker, Niall Marriot, but when it comes to the micro-politics of the local level, this is exceptionally hard to achieve. Tackling difficult socio-political issues such as tenure security, gender inequality and the politics of access to benefits from PES must be central to our strategies, whilst also accepting that these obstacles may never be overcome entirely.
Secondly, our perspective on community engagement in PES is commonly unrealistic and naïve. A key focus of discussion at the workshop was the capacity and experience of local communities, and the expectations we place upon them. Niall Marriot discussed this in terms of risk[2], asking how we structure PES to distribute this risk between stakeholders without exploiting those that PES is designed to support. Here there is an important normative aspect to the design of PES and negotiations with local communities, whose members often lack experience in these kinds of issues and are unfamiliar with the risks to which they may be exploed[3]. Pascual et al. (2014) point out that addressing such social equity issues in PES is often hindered by the prevailing focus on economic efficiency on which it is based. For investors, the critical questions are about the bottom line and return on their capital. Whilst poor relations with a local community in a PES scheme are undesirable, both financially and in terms of reputation in a globalised world of instant communication, how do ethical issues balance out against opportunities to increase profit, and what’s to prevent investors simply ignoring social equity concerns?
Conclusions
We have to accept that valuing ecosystem services, and implementing PES will never be as simple as we would like it to be. As one participant at the workshop pointed out, even the successful examples of PES are incredibly complex and face multiple challenges. Here there are important links between the first and third areas of my discussion: Scientists have developed sophisticated methods for assessing and valuing ecosystem services, but we live in an intricate world where this may never capture the full complexity of the natural processes that support us and, even if we could, we live in an equally complicated social world that PES cannot escape the politics of. This does not mean that PES is a hopeless endeavour, it means that our view of PES is hopelessly simple, and we need to draw on our experience and understanding to amend our expectations and embrace this messiness.
PES has been a popular topic of research and debate, but we still need better communication between the pro and anti PES research literatures, and acknowledgement that both over-simplify the arguments of the other. As a social scientist, I need to remember that not all PES represents market trading of privatised goods, but I hold to the argument that PES involves commodification, and that this has ramifications for both nature and society that should not be ignored.
Moving beyond ‘it’s more complicated than that’, complexity in PES is found across the natural/social science divide. PES faces obstacles that are the products of imperfect knowledge, opposing perspectives (and defective communication between theme) and inherent politics. We can do much to tackle these obstacles, but we cannot overcome them entirely, and accepting this messiness is one of the biggest challenges to learning from our experiences with other ‘win-win’ strategies, and embracing the reality that PES may work in some places at some times, but is not wonderfully simply, or simply wonderful.
At the most recent Interdisciplinary Exchanges workshop on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), the idea of simplicity, and over-simplification was a theme that was touched on across the pre-workshop readings, the presentations and discussions on the day. Whilst I hold my hands up to the frustrating social science habit of replying that something is ‘more complicated than that’, my aim here is to explore three ways in which simplicity surrounds PES from both sides of the natural/social science divide:
1. A Simple Mechanism that Cannot Cope with the Complexity of Natural Systems
The first area of hidden complexity in PES relates to the natural world and how we understand it. As Adams (2014) recently outlined, there are many questions that present obstacles to the simplicity of the PES idea, and need to be answered in order to implement it successfully:
Firstly, PES relies on us having sufficient understanding of the complexity of ecosystems, of the different species and landscapes that make them up, and how these interact with one another, to be able to accurately identify the processes that underpin the ecosystem services that we are trying to protect and to predict the outcomes if certain alterations are made.
Secondly, the richness of our natural wealth means that an area of land may provide critical ecosystem services relating to hydrology, nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration and biodiversity at different levels and all at the same time, but the management decisions for each of these categories do not necessarily complement each other. Working out priorities at different scales within PES is therefore not easy: for example, which should take priority in PES projects, a local environmental service that secures water supply for small, rural communities in a developing country or carbon sequestration opportunities that can contribute to global efforts to combat climate change? Perhaps we can have both, but it is easy to see that both might not attract the same level of international interest, or funding. There is a politics to which ecosystem services are visible and perceived as important, just as there is a politics to nature conservation when the giant panda generates far more interest (and funding) than micro-organisms that might be critical to ecosystem function. But then who wants to sponsor a micro-organism?
2. Over-simplification of PES as Privatisation
The next area of over-simplification relates to a divide in perception and terminology between pro and anti PES academic camps. There has been a large literature critical of PES for the commodification of natural resources and privatisation that is envisaged. As speaker Mark Reed pointed out, this view is naive. As a researcher more familiar with the PES sceptic literature than the ins and outs of valuation and the economics of ecosystem services, I was intrigued by this counter-argument. Costanza et al. (2014) share this view that opponents have done much to argue against PES on the basis of inappropriate incorporation of market mechanisms and reification of privatisation. They argue that PES does not have to involve privatisation (and the criticisms of alienation and issues of power, tenure and access for deprived groups that this is often linked to). Similarly, Brockington (2010) makes the point that PES does not necessarily involve competitive markets, drawing on the example of the Norwegian government pledging to pay $250 million to the government of Guyana if they successful tackled deforestation (see here). Valuation of ecosystem services can be a useful tool to assist in management decision-making, and whilst in some cases this can involve market trading, it is well recognised amongst proponents that incentivising management through payments is not appropriate in all cases[1], and the decision to implement market mechanisms must be context-dependent (Costanza et al., 2014).
However, the idea that opposition to the valuation of ecosystem services is based on assumptions of privatisation is itself an over-simplification. Whilst it is clear that privatisation is not a necessary component of PES, and commodification resulting in market trading is only one aspect of such an approach, Costanza et al.’s (2014) claim that valuation does not necessarily involve commodification seems to miss the point that commodification is not simply about market trading. Yes, it is about “creating new things out of nature that can be sold” (Brockington, 2010: 367), but it is also about changing the value and understanding of natural resources and ecosystem services. It represents a shift in nature-society relations that conceptualises the natural world in financial terms, and whilst this can help to put nature conservation objectives on a level playing field with other priorities, and to make environmental arguments visible and legitimate in the global economy, it is an important shift in how we perceive the natural world, the ways in which we use it and how decisions should be made about it.
3. Over-simplification of Views of the Community
The final aspect of simplification that I discuss here is that surrounding local communities, and their role in PES. This is a prominent theme in the literature, and one that generated much discussion at the workshop. Whilst there is a large variety of PES schemes involving different actors at different levels, much of the promise for international development is linked to schemes that, similar to community-based approaches to conservation, involve participation by local actors and facilitate the accrual of benefits at the local level to incentivise sustainable management and assist in poverty reduction. There is a long history of research into such approaches across the world, however, and the outlook is mixed; the expected ‘win-win’ outcomes have often proved illusive, and patterns of benefit distribution are clearly tied to structures of inequality, wealth and power within and across communities. Accepting that there are winners and losers in such schemes, and trade-offs between objectives and stakeholders is vital to a realistic expectation of what PES does and what it will achieve. Equity, transparency and mutual benefit for all involved were described as the core pillars of PES by our speaker, Niall Marriot, but when it comes to the micro-politics of the local level, this is exceptionally hard to achieve. Tackling difficult socio-political issues such as tenure security, gender inequality and the politics of access to benefits from PES must be central to our strategies, whilst also accepting that these obstacles may never be overcome entirely.
Secondly, our perspective on community engagement in PES is commonly unrealistic and naïve. A key focus of discussion at the workshop was the capacity and experience of local communities, and the expectations we place upon them. Niall Marriot discussed this in terms of risk[2], asking how we structure PES to distribute this risk between stakeholders without exploiting those that PES is designed to support. Here there is an important normative aspect to the design of PES and negotiations with local communities, whose members often lack experience in these kinds of issues and are unfamiliar with the risks to which they may be exploed[3]. Pascual et al. (2014) point out that addressing such social equity issues in PES is often hindered by the prevailing focus on economic efficiency on which it is based. For investors, the critical questions are about the bottom line and return on their capital. Whilst poor relations with a local community in a PES scheme are undesirable, both financially and in terms of reputation in a globalised world of instant communication, how do ethical issues balance out against opportunities to increase profit, and what’s to prevent investors simply ignoring social equity concerns?
Conclusions
We have to accept that valuing ecosystem services, and implementing PES will never be as simple as we would like it to be. As one participant at the workshop pointed out, even the successful examples of PES are incredibly complex and face multiple challenges. Here there are important links between the first and third areas of my discussion: Scientists have developed sophisticated methods for assessing and valuing ecosystem services, but we live in an intricate world where this may never capture the full complexity of the natural processes that support us and, even if we could, we live in an equally complicated social world that PES cannot escape the politics of. This does not mean that PES is a hopeless endeavour, it means that our view of PES is hopelessly simple, and we need to draw on our experience and understanding to amend our expectations and embrace this messiness.
PES has been a popular topic of research and debate, but we still need better communication between the pro and anti PES research literatures, and acknowledgement that both over-simplify the arguments of the other. As a social scientist, I need to remember that not all PES represents market trading of privatised goods, but I hold to the argument that PES involves commodification, and that this has ramifications for both nature and society that should not be ignored.
Moving beyond ‘it’s more complicated than that’, complexity in PES is found across the natural/social science divide. PES faces obstacles that are the products of imperfect knowledge, opposing perspectives (and defective communication between theme) and inherent politics. We can do much to tackle these obstacles, but we cannot overcome them entirely, and accepting this messiness is one of the biggest challenges to learning from our experiences with other ‘win-win’ strategies, and embracing the reality that PES may work in some places at some times, but is not wonderfully simply, or simply wonderful.
Footnotes:
[1] Rosalind Bark discussed some interesting examples of non-monetary PES schemes (see Banerjee & Bark, 2013 and Robinson et al., 2014).
[2] Particularly risk associated with: (1) market and price fluctuations that might affect payments; and (2) natural perturbations, such as flood, fire or drought that might affect the ability of a community to deliver the ecosystem services that payments are based on.
[3] Similarly it is important to question the experience of PES investors in engaging in a development context, and the lack of experience of many NGOs (who commonly act as intermediaries and facilitators of such schemes) in engaging in the investment and business side of such projects.
[1] Rosalind Bark discussed some interesting examples of non-monetary PES schemes (see Banerjee & Bark, 2013 and Robinson et al., 2014).
[2] Particularly risk associated with: (1) market and price fluctuations that might affect payments; and (2) natural perturbations, such as flood, fire or drought that might affect the ability of a community to deliver the ecosystem services that payments are based on.
[3] Similarly it is important to question the experience of PES investors in engaging in a development context, and the lack of experience of many NGOs (who commonly act as intermediaries and facilitators of such schemes) in engaging in the investment and business side of such projects.
References
Adams, W. M. (2014). The value of valuing nature. Science, 346 (6209), 549-551.
Banerjee, O., Bark, R. H. (2013). Incentives for ecosystem service supply in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. International Journal of Water Resources Development 29(4), 544-556
Brockington, D. (2011). Ecosystem services and fictitious com-modities. Environmental conservation, 38(04), 367-369
Costanza, R., de Groot, R., Sutton, P., van der Ploeg, S., Anderson, S. J., Kubiszewski, I., & Turner, R. K. (2014). Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 26, 152-158
Pascual, U., Phelps, J., Garmendia, E., Brown, K., Corbera, E., Martin, A.,& Muradian, R. (2014). Social equity matters in payments for ecosystem services. BioScience, biu146
Robinson, C., Bark, R., Garrick, D., Pollino, C. (2014). Sustaining local values through river basin governance: community-based initiatives in Australia’s Murray- Darling Basin. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2014.976699
Adams, W. M. (2014). The value of valuing nature. Science, 346 (6209), 549-551.
Banerjee, O., Bark, R. H. (2013). Incentives for ecosystem service supply in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. International Journal of Water Resources Development 29(4), 544-556
Brockington, D. (2011). Ecosystem services and fictitious com-modities. Environmental conservation, 38(04), 367-369
Costanza, R., de Groot, R., Sutton, P., van der Ploeg, S., Anderson, S. J., Kubiszewski, I., & Turner, R. K. (2014). Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 26, 152-158
Pascual, U., Phelps, J., Garmendia, E., Brown, K., Corbera, E., Martin, A.,& Muradian, R. (2014). Social equity matters in payments for ecosystem services. BioScience, biu146
Robinson, C., Bark, R., Garrick, D., Pollino, C. (2014). Sustaining local values through river basin governance: community-based initiatives in Australia’s Murray- Darling Basin. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. DOI: 10.1080/09640568.2014.976699
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