Dataset Information

Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindio, Colombia.

ABSTRACT: The effectiveness of conservation interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is often evaluated--if it is evaluated at all--only at the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently successful interventions may not result in long-term conservation benefits, a problem known as that of permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the permanence of land use change induced by a short-term, asset-building PES program implemented in Quindío, Colombia, between 2003 and 2008. This the first PES program to have a control group for comparison. Under this program, PES had been found to have a positive and highly significant impact on land use. To assess the long-term permanence of these changes, both PES recipients and control households were re-surveyed in 2011, four years after the last payment was made. We find that the land use changes that had been induced by PES were broadly sustained in intervening years, with minor differences across specific practices and sub-groups of participants, indicating that these changes were in fact permanent. The patterns of change in the period after the PES program was completed also help better understand the reasons for the program's success. These results suggest that, at least in the case of productive land uses such as silvopastoral practices under conditions such as those at the study site, asset-building PES programs can be effective at encouraging land owners to adopt environmentally-beneficial land management practices and that the benefits will persist after payments cease.

SUBMITTER: Pagiola S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4773100 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindío, Colombia.

Pagiola Stefano S Honey-Rosés Jordi J Freire-González Jaume J

PloS one 20160301 3

The effectiveness of conservation interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is often evaluated--if it is evaluated at all--only at the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently successful interventions may not result in long-term conservation benefits, a problem known as that of permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the permanence of land use change induced by a short-term, asset-bui ...[more]

PMID: 26930668

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Project description:Government based Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have been criticized for not maximizing environmental effectiveness through appropriate targeting, while instead prioritizing social side-objectives. In Mexico, existing literature on how the Payments for Ecosystem Services-Hydrological program (PSA-H) has targeted deforestation and forest degradation shows that both the process of identifying the eligible areas and the choice of the selection criteria for enrolling forest parcels have been under the influence of competing agendas. In the present paper we study the influence of the PSA-H multi-level governance on the environmental effectiveness of the program-the degree to which forest at high risk of deforestation is enrolled- building from a "policyscape" framework. In particular, we combine governance analysis with two distinct applications of the policyscape framework: First, at national level we assess the functional overlap between the PSA-H and other environmental and rural programs with regard to the risk of deforestation. Second, at regional level in the states of Chiapas and Yucatan, we describe the changing policy agenda and the role of technical intermediaries in defining the temporal spatialization of the PSA-H eligible and enrolled areas with regard to key socio-economic criteria. We find that, although at national level the PSA-H program has been described as coping with both social and environmental indicators thanks to successful adaptive management, our analysis show that PSA-H is mainly found in communities where deforestation risk is low and in combination with other environmental programs (protected areas and forest management programs). Such inertia is reinforced at regional level as a result of the eligible areas' characteristics and the behaviour of technical intermediaries, which seek to minimise transaction costs and sources of uncertainty. Our project-specific analysis shows the importance of integrating the governance of a program in the policyscape framework as a way to better systematize complex interactions at different spatial and institutional scales between policies and landscape characteristics.

Dataset Information

Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindio, Colombia.

Publications

Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindío, Colombia.

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