Talking Tenure: Challenges for Real World PES

EKO ECO Guest Blogger on April 23, 2010 Comment

By Kelly Moore Brands, Carbon & Biodiversity Research Assistant, Ecosystem Marketplace

Last week at the Biodiversity and Forestry Seminar Series held at the USAID offices here in Washington, Drs. Lisa Naughton and Matthew Turner of the University of Wisconsin's Land Tenure Center (LTC) (my alma mater, go Badgers!), spoke on tenure issues in the context of payments for ecosystem services (PES) projects - in particular, those projects in rural poor areas. The LTC is part of a Translinks partnership between the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Earth Institute of Columbia University, Enterprise Works/VITA, Forest Trends and USAID, which aims to help the rural poor through conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, and to demonstrate how PES works in the "real world."

The goal of PES is to change incentive structures in order to change behaviors that threaten ecosystem services - economists call this "internalizing the externalities." PES seeks to give value to ecosystem services like fresh water, soil retention and climate regulation that have previously been undervalued (or not valued at all), by having resource users pay for good environmental stewardship. In other words, rewarding local people for caring for their environment by passing on the costs of keeping those services intact to the users of those services (downstream water users, for example).

PES projects can be challenging in many ways, but, as Dr. Naughton pointed out, ultimately the most difficult challenge is in deciding who should receive the payments. Who are the people that are protecting those services, and is there a difference between those people and the owners of the land? Is the land under collective ownership? Are collective rights recognized under national or local law? If the land owner and the land manager are different, is there the potential for the owner to take over the land once it has a cash value?

These questions and more have been asked many times in the past few years as PES has gained popularity as a tool for biodiversity conservation. Generally speaking, the places with the highest priority and potential for conservation tend to be in the poorest areas of the globe, and in areas where land conflict is high and ownership is uncertain. While individuals may be the managers of the land, either legally or functionally, governments or community leaders may have authority over access or use rights. Land managers without title to the land, even if they have been managing it for generations, could be stripped of their land by governments wanting to cash in on PES payments, or displaced by PES prospectors. In some places, women can only hold rights to land through their husbands, so their use rights are very insecure. If we do not consider the full implications of how and to whom payments should be made, we risk further compromising already vulnerable peoples, as well as the integrity of PES programs.

With $6 billion in financing going to reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) in the next few years, the stakes are high. Ensuring that these programs do not fail because of insecure tenure rights should be a priority, and programs to help improve tenure can help bolster PES as well as the rights of marginalized peoples.

For a more comprehensive version of this post, check out the paper a colleague and I wrote last year (before the talks in Copenhagen) on REDD and tenure reform. For other resources on tenure and PES, see the Rights and Resources Initiative, which supports forest tenure, policy and market reforms, and organizations like the Center for International Forestry Research and the Forest Peoples Programme.