Payment for ecosystem services in Lima’s watersheds: power and imaginaries in an urban-rural hydrosocial territory

ABSTRACT

In Peru, payment for ecosystem services is an increasingly popular mechanism to secure the transfer of water from rural to urban areas. This article analyzes the process of setting up such a scheme in the watersheds of Lima. The concept of hydrosocial territories and a power analysis are used to scrutinize how urban-based imaginaries and top-down approaches result in a disregard of local knowledge, rationalities, history of urban–rural relations and land ownership structures in the highlands. This could result in unintended outcomes of the scheme and in subordinating upstream communities to the city’s needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Payment for ecosystem services
• power analysis
• rural-urban relations
• hydrosocial territories
• Lima

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Grupo de Trabajo de Conservación e Infraestructura Natural de las Cuencas Chillón – Rímac – Lurín.

2. In Peru, PES schemes are now called compensation mechanisms for ecosystem services (mecanismos de retribución por servicios ecosistémicos). The renaming of the PES-like regulations is a sign of the uneasiness of many experts and policy makers with the market-based idea behind the PES principle. Despite this, the compensation mechanisms in Peru do not entail a fundamentally different idea.

3. Such as the former National Project for the Management of Hydrographic Basins and Soil Conservation (PRONAMACHS), which is now AGRORURAL, part of the Ministry of Agriculture.