Community Forest Owners Evaluate a Decade of Payments for Ecosystem Services in the Mexican Cloud Forest: The Importance of Attention to Indigenous Sovereignty in Conservation

ABSTRACT

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs have taken a variety of forms that depend on many mediating factors, such as national and local politics, land tenure, regional collective action, the capacity of intermediaries, and socio-ecological context. This diversity has produced unsurprisingly mixed experiences, with many falling short of achieving the twin goals of environmental and social benefits and some causing adverse consequences. This study examines one rare PES case that has contributed both to forest conservation and to community livelihoods. In this study, community forest owners from four indigenous communities in the Mexican cloud forest evaluate their participation in ten years of a public PES program to support watershed stewardship. We argue that attention to indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in program implementation contributed to widely appreciated socio-environmental benefits. Though many PES programs are implemented in indigenous communities, scholarly debates have rarely dealt directly with these issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Common pool resources
• community-based natural resource management
• indigenous sovereignty
• Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs)
• participatory approaches

Acknowledgments

Interviews and data recording were conducted by an excellent team of community researchers from Chinantec communities in Oaxaca: Julio César Martinez Cruz, René Martinez Martinez, Anabel Hernández Osorio, Francisco Javier Osorio Martinez, Celestino Osorio Osorio, Raúl Juan Lorenzo, Avelino Enríquez Gregorio, Jesús Manuel Morales, and Lucio Leonardo Doroteo. Geoconservación staff offered invaluable insight and support. Special thanks to Veronica Dujon and three anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

Gretchen Daily’s Nature’s Services (1997) was among the early texts that helped popularize the term ecosystem services (ES) as “the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems, and the species that make them up, sustain and fulfill human life” (3). Though many programs to protect ecosystem services predate the popularization of the term (e.g,. farmer compensation for soil erosion prevention, premium prices for shade-grown coffee and ecotourism linked to biodiversity), the last two decades have seen a proliferation of theories and policies that link resource conservation to compensation measures dubbed “payments for ecosystem services.” The Mexican National Forest Commission, which began its program in 2003, defines forest ES as the local, regional or global benefits of forest ecosystems—including water storage and filtration, soil retention, climate change mitigation, and biodiversity protection, which come from naturally occurring or sustainably managed systems.