Post date: Sep 18, 2014 8:24:10 AM
Bremer LL, Farley KA, Lopez-Carr D. 2014. What factors influence participation in payment for ecosystem services programs? An evaluation of Ecuador’s SocioPáramo program. Land Use Policy 36:122-133.
PES programs have been touted as a means to achieve conservation goals while also alleviating povertyand promoting rural development. However, the degree to which these goals are met depends, in part,on accessibility and desirability of programs targeting rural communities and smallholders. Empiri-cal research on factors motivating or dissuading PES landowner participation remains limited and amore complete understanding of these factors is critical to improving PES social equity outcomes. Inthis paper, we evaluate factors facilitating and constraining participation in Ecuador’s SocioPáramo pro-gram, a recently launched PES initiative targeting highland Andean grasslands (páramos). We conductedsemi-structured interviews with all community landowner participants who had enrolled by May 2011,the majority of individual landowner participants who had enrolled by October 2010, and several non-participant communities and individuals. We found that, while SocioPáramo is attracting substantialparticipation among rural farmers and communities, a number of factors, including land tenure require-ments, legal or biophysical land-use restrictions, and a need for pre-existing social, human, and financialcapital, make SocioPáramo more accessible and desirable to larger, and often wealthier, landowners.While motivations for enrolling in the program varied, a key similarity among participants was accessto alternative livelihood sources, a low opportunity cost associated with program land-use regulations,and a high value placed on the water provisioning services of the páramo. The majority of participantsdescribed incentives as a “reward” for conserving, as a means to strengthen existing conservation effortsor land security, or as a means to compensate for legal or biophysical land use restrictions. Our resultssuggest that the broader context of land tenure security, access to social capital, environmental atti-tudes, and alternative livelihood strategy development may require more attention in order to achievegreater participation among rural smallholders and communities. These results provide useful lessonsfor developing and adapting this and other PES programs so that they can better meet social goals.