Payment for Environmental Services: mobilising an epistemic community to construct dominant policy

Abstract

The alleged capacity of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) to reach conservation policy goals, while reducing poverty in a cost-effective manner, makes it an extremely attractive development instrument for policymakers and international funding agencies. This article reconstructs the process of envisioning and building the National PES Strategy in Colombia. It reveals how this conservation policy has resulted from the mobilisation of the transnational/national PES epistemic community and its globally expanding discourse. The influential PES network generates internally defined standards of success that proceed without reference to empirical evidence as to the impacts of the implemented policies. PES adoption is influenced by regulatory instruments’ unsatisfactory outcomes, the ways in which market-environmentalist models induce profound indifference towards on-the-ground policy impacts, the discursive power and alignment properties of the PES policy epistemic community, and financial and political pressures by international banks and environmental NGOs.

Keywords:

• Payment for Environmental Services
• policy model
• epistemic community
• development
• Colombia

Notes

1. See, for example, Boelens et al. (2014), Brockington (2011), Büscher and Fletcher (2014), Büscher et al. (2012), Bumpus and Liverman (2008), Gilbertson and Reyes (2009), Kosoy and Corbera (2010), Lohmann (2010, 2011), McAfee and Shapiro (2010), Mcelwee (2012), Milne and Adams (2012), Newell and Paterson (2010), Pokorny et al. (2012), Rodríguez-de-Francisco and Budds (2014), Sullivan (2009).

2. Wunder (2008) explains that, while private PES schemes tend to focus on environmental goals alone, publicly financed ones aim at conservation and poverty alleviation together (see also Pagiola et al. 2010).

3. The different policy areas tend to have an excluding set of experts called a policy network. A PES policy network that meets Haas’s definition would then be termed an ‘epistemic community’ (see Zito 2001).

4. Although in the Colombian legal context the concept of market-based instruments by then was not entirely new (see, for example, Decree 2811/1974 and Law 99/1993), their actual implementation and operation were less frequent (Huber et al. 1998).

5. The National PES Strategy determines that implementation methodology should contain at least the following elements: description of the environmental service; geographic area where the project is carried out; description of current and desired land uses and the impact of change in relation to the environmental service; determination of the environmental service providers; and the way in which changes in environmental services will be monitored (Minambiente 2008).