This doctoral dissertation research project examines how urban-based Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs change rural land-use practices. PES, a market-based mechanism for conservation, compensates local communities and households in or around targeted ecosystems to change their land-use practices for the conservation of targeted natural resources. In addition to paying for the natural resource, PES schemes require individuals, households, and communities living in and around targeted resources to produce and maintain the ecological service with their own labor. This project advances research on market-based conservation programs by examining labor processes, and thus value production within them. Specifically the project will focus on (1) how PES schemes develop interventions; (2) how PES schemes enroll communities, and thus, workers; (3) the characteristics of households engaging with PES interventions; and (4) and how labor requirements for PES schemes influence individual and community land-uses. The doctoral student will examine a well-established PES water program in the Andean highlands using multiple methods, including participant observation, key informant interviews, document collection, household surveys, and labor and land-use mapping walking tours. Data analysis will focus on the processes of labor mobilization and the reorganization of labor within communities and households.
This project examines a PES program that serve as models for other watershed projects throughout the Americas. As such, this research will benefit broader society by informing sound policy decisions on PES conservation programs. The research will be conducted in collaboration with a local non-governmental organization (NGO) with which educational and dissemination activities are planned in both English and Spanish. Research results and data will be incorporated into teaching and learning modules for undergraduate courses in human and regional geography in the US. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is a market mechanism for natural resource conservation. Payments from ‘consumers’ are made to ‘producers’ to compensate for their conservation activities in and around the sites of environmental services. More than simply inscribing a value on environmental services to be bought by consumers, however, PES schemes require individuals, households, and communities living in and around the targeted resources to produce and maintain the ecological service with their own labor. The primary goal of this project is to determine the processes, practices and outcomes of transforming ecosystem services through rural labor into a recognizable commodity that can be bought and sold. This research examines FONAG, a payments for ecosystem services program in Ecuador’s Andes that is based out of the city of Quito and targets the high altitude humid grasslands in the surrounding watershed for conservation. FONAG is a model for at least 17 other PES watershed conservation projects, and has received over US$3 million in donations from USAID. The research determined that PES interacts with rural labor in several ways. First, the watershed territory acts as a broad platform to attract urban investment and alliances across sectors. Although these actors shape how the PES program is initiated in rural communities, their ideas on what constitutes conservation don’t always align. This results in tension between constituents and donors over the types of conservation projects to be implemented. Second, communities tend to only accept intervention projects that compliment activities and land uses that are already being implemented in the community. Therefore, large changes in land-uses cannot be expected to be a direct result of intervention projects. Next, only a small fraction of rural community will directly benefit from PES despite the large labor investment of the entire community. Finally, PES labor practices demand space within the working landscape of a rural community, resulting in small scale changes in land use. Overall, the results indicate that existing land use and attending labor practices should be carefully examined when considering the implementation of a PES program. The results are applicable for informing the policies of both government and non-governmental agencies that are instrumental in the development of PES programs. Because of its financial stability, the case study program of FONAG has been used as a model to develop daughter programs throughout Latin America. Most of these programs are in the early years of establishment, and therefore the findings produced through the in-depth analyses of the interaction of FONAG with socio-ecological aspects of rural communities will be especially beneficial as these programs move from the process of capitalizing the trust fund and into the establishment of rural development projects and conservation interventions. This study will be useful as a comparison with the other programs, and can also offer valuable insight in predicting the potential future directions that the programs may take. The findings of this research will be made widely available through a completed doctoral dissertation, conference presentations and journal publications. Furthermore, this research was conducted in conjunction with the Applied Biodiversity Program at Texas A&M University and contributes to community exchange that connects ecological and social science research in the field of biodiversity conservation.
