Payments for Environmental Services : new panacea or useful auxiliaries for managing landscapes. ? – PESMIX

Programs of payments for environmental services (PES) have become quite popular today, recognized worldwide as a possible tool to maintain endangered ecosystems, especially in developing countries since PES are also portrayed as tools for poverty reduction. In their establishment process, PES schemes fit within an institutional pathways, their design is influenced by a diversity of actors (State, international NGOs, civil organizations, farmers organizations, communities …), affecting their relative positioning to other policy responses to environmental management. As PES develop and cover wider area, their territorial interactions with the existing environmental, agricultural and rural development policy instruments become acute. The present project proposes to tackle these issues.

We first propose to assess several PES schemes in situ according to the three performance criteria that are the effectiveness, efficiency and equity of the programs, comparing as far as possible sites “with” and “without” PES. Then we will analyze the possible articulations PES schemes might have with the other tools of the environmental policy. We will also reflect upon the legal dimension of PES programs in order to enrich the debate and fully analyse the potential for PES instruments to be normalised and employed by states, or to be softly regulated through supervised markets. All these elements, will allow us then to envisage in which institutional, legal, agro-ecological situations, various configurations of environmental policy mix might be the most reliable.

To this end, the PESMIX project proposes an approach based on the comparison of PES schemes in two countries namely Mexico (emerging country) and Madagascar (least developed country which could be classified as “fragile State”). We believe the very distinct PES paysages – two large national public funded PES in Mexico vs a multitude of small scale private-led PES – associated with the different institutional pathways of these countries will help us identify the various formation of a PES policy mix.