Esteve Corbera, guest editor of a special issue on Payments for Ecosystem Services
The journal Development and Change has published the special issue “Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South”. Guest edited by ICTA-UAB researcher Esteve Corbera together with Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza, Pamela McElwee and Gert Van Hecken, the special issue will be free to access and download through the end of February.
The eleven articles of the special issue take a deep and nuanced approach to analyzing the dynamics and outcomes of payments for ecosystem services (PES) initiatives in the Global South, from NGOâ€initiated, smallâ€scale carbon offsetting on the steppes of Mongolia and watershed management projects in Colombia and Ecuador, to regional projects for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) in Indonesia and Brazil, to nationally scaled programs of the centralized states of Mexico, Guatemala, China and Vietnam.
This collection of articles fills a current gap in the literature on market-based environmental policies and programs, which has tended to either view these approaches through a technocratic lens in which slight tinkerings with the model are all that is needed to correct imperfections or through an entirely critical frame, understanding them as necessarily hegemonic impositions of neoliberal logics.
Taking a political ecology approach, each case represented in this special issue is analyzed with an understanding of PES initiatives, similar to other development projects and programs, as influenced by both global structural trajectories (e.g. capitalism, developmentalism or environmentalism) and the locally situated, historically defined and grounded practices of the actors involved. In this sharpening of our understanding of what PES is in practice and what it can become, we begin to see that certain components of the neoclassical economic model, while most certainly promoted and imposed through the global neoliberal political project, can afford and may allow for local interpretations and flexibility: the need for valuation of nature; the creation of institutions; and the negotiations that inevitably surround the distribution of benefits.
Together, this collection of articles provides deep insights into the ways and degrees to which subjects of neoliberal interventions are able to find ‘surfaces of engagement’ through which they can, to a greater or lesser extent, alter, adapt and, in some cases, create spaces for wholesale transformations of exogenously imposed models in conformity to their own aims and goals.
A special issue of the journal Development and Change, “Beyond Market Logics: Payments for Ecosystem Services as Alternative Development Practices in the Global South,” is available online: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14677660/2020/51/1.
