Co-producing environmental conservation and social equity: Is conditionality in Payments for Ecosystem Services a necessity or impediment?

Modern conservation approaches have proved largely ineffective to redress ecosystem degradation at local to global scales. There is a growing interest in market-based conservation as a promising alternative. In particular, payments for ecosystem services (PES) have become increasingly popular, with $66 billion spent globally on watershed-focused PES programs as of 2011. At the core of PES is the assumption that payments made to natural resource managers to produce environmental benefits must be conditional on observable actions or measurable outcomes, which implies that natural resource managers need to be coerced (through monitoring and enforcement) to conserve the environment. However, cultural and political ecologists have long argued that natural resource managers in the Global South possess intrinsic motivations for conservation and that social and cultural systems, political economies, and institutions play important roles in shaping their natural resource decisions. Evidence from geography and other social sciences also suggests that enforcing conditionality in PES is associated with reduced social equity within and across communities. The goal of this research is to determine the role of conditionality in PES in shaping human-environment relations, and the extent to which conditionality can be removed to produce environmental benefits without sacrificing social equity. The research objectives are to: (1) determine the effect of conditionality in PES on environmental conservation outcomes; (2) determine the effect of conditionality in PES on social equity outcomes; and (3) identify mechanisms through which conditional and unconditional payments produce intended and unintended environmental conservation and social equity outcomes. To do so, the team will use a mixed-methods approach that integrates a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with qualitative enquiries to assess conditional versus unconditional PES in 130 rural Bolivian communities.