Drew Bennet
Drew Bennett, Oregon State University
"Reconciling the Theory and Practice on Payments for Ecosystem Services"
Attention to the concept of payments for ecosystem services (PES) has increased dramatically over the past decade, and PES schemes are emerging throughout the world to address a variety of environmental problems. In concept, PES programs compensate land managers for practices that provide valuable ecosystem services to beneficiaries that fund these programs. Although originally promoted as a market‐like and economically efficient approach to environmental management, an alternative conceptualization of PES is emerging that recognizes the public good nature of many ecosystems services and contends that PES is better viewed as “incentives for collective action.”
By examining how and why several PES programs were established in the United States, Dr. Bennett will show that these programs emerged under a variety of social and environmental conditions that are theoretically unfavorable to the development of efficient markets. As a result, he demonstrates that the emerging view of PES as incentives for collective action is a better conceptual basis for PES and suggests that efforts to design and implement PES programs can be greatly informed by the extensive collective action literature.
The significance of these findings imply a need to expand from a focus on the market logic of efficiency to an approach that also promotes social capital and the collaborative capacity of community groups in the implementation of PES programs. In an effort to reconcile the theory and practice on PES, I use a social‐ecological systems framework to integrate competing perspectives and provide insight into the emergence and functioning of PES in diverse contexts.
January 15, 2015