Payment for Environmental Services: mobilising an epistemic community to construct dominant policy

• Published in: Environmental politics Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 481 - 500
• Main Authors: Rodríguez de Francisco, Jean Carlo, Boelens, Rutgerd
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 04.05.2015; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Antipoverty programs; Apathy; Banking; Banks; Colombia; Communities; Community; Community action; Community property; Community services; Conservation; Cost analysis; Development; Discourse analysis; ecosystem services; Environment models; Environmental policy; Environmental services; Environmentalism; Environmentalists; epistemic community; Epistemology; field; International banking; irrigation; mexico; Networks; NGOs; Non-governmental organizations; Nongovernmental organizations; Payment for Environmental Services; Policy making; policy model; Political finance; politics; Poverty; Poverty alleviation; Power; Transnationalism; Colombia
• ISSN: 0964-4016; 1743-8934
• DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2015.1014658

The alleged capacity of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) to reach conservation policy goals, while reducing poverty in a cost-effective manner, makes it an extremely attractive development instrument for policymakers and international funding agencies. This article reconstructs the process of envisioning and building the National PES Strategy in Colombia. It reveals how this conservation policy has resulted from the mobilisation of the transnational/national PES epistemic community and its globally expanding discourse. The influential PES network generates internally defined standards of success that proceed without reference to empirical evidence as to the impacts of the implemented policies. PES adoption is influenced by regulatory instruments' unsatisfactory outcomes, the ways in which market-environmentalist models induce profound indifference towards on-the-ground policy impacts, the discursive power and alignment properties of the PES policy epistemic community, and financial and political pressures by international banks and environmental NGOs.