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Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: an overview of the issues

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Title Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: an overview of the issues
 
Creator Engel, S.
Pagiola, S.
Wunder, Sven
 
Subject incentives
conservation
 
Description Payments for environmental services (PES) have attracted increasing interest as amechanism to translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide environmental services (ES). In this introductory paper, we set the stage for the rest of this Special Issue of Ecological Economics by reviewing the main issues arising in PES design and implementation and discussing these in the light of environmental economics. We start with a discussion of PES definition and scope. We proceed to review some of the principal dimensions and design characteristics of PES programs and then analyze how PES compares to alternative policy instruments. Finally, we examine in detail two important aspects of PES programs: their effectiveness and their distributional implications. PES is not a silver bullet that can be used to address any environmental problem, but a tool tailored to address a specific set of problems: those in which ecosystems are is managedbecause many of their benefits are externalities from the perspective of ecosystem managers. PES is based on the beneficiary-pays rather than the polluter-pays principle, and as such is attractive in settings where ES providers are poor, marginalized landholders or powerful groups of actors. An important distinction within PES is between user-financed PES in which the buyers are the users of the ES, and government-financed PES in which the buyers are others (typically the government) acting on behalf of ES users. In practice, PES programs differ in the type and scale of ES demand, the payment source, the type of activity paid for, the performance measure used, as well as the payment mode and amount. The effectiveness and efficiency of PES depends crucially on program design.
 
Date 2008-05
2012-06-04T09:12:53Z
2012-06-04T09:12:53Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Engel, S., Pagiola, S., Wunder, S. 2008. Designing payments for environmental services in theory and practice: an overview of the issues . Ecological Economics 65 :663-674 doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.03.011. Elsevier Science Publishers. ISSN: 0921-8009.
0921-8009
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/19954
https://www.cifor.org/knowledge/publication/2555
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.03.011
 
Language en
 
Rights Copyrighted; all rights reserved
 
Publisher Elsevier BV
 
Source Ecological Economics