Global biodiversity loss and climate change are two of humanity’s greatest challenges. In tropical and subtropical forests, both biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation can be simultaneously achieved by preventing changes in land cover, particularly by halting the advance of the cattle and agricultural frontiers. Policies to address these challenges include protected areas, subsidies for sustainable production, and conditional payments to local landowners in exchange for “not touching” forests. Such “payments for ecosystem services” (PES) have mushroomed across the Global South since the late 1990s. 

In a new publication, we draw on our long-term professional experience with PES schemes in Mexico and other countries to present a provocative perspective on such conservation payments, suggesting that widespread implementation of PES policies has led to a new variety of environmentalism – the “environmentalism of the paid”.

Types of environmentalism 

In his seminal book “The Environmentalism of the Poor”, Joan Martinez-Alier presented a new and distinctive variety of environmentalism that emphasised the negative effects of environmental degradation on the wellbeing of the urban and rural poor who rely largely on ecosystems for their livelihoods. The environmentalism of the poor is distinct from previously identified environmentalisms, including the “cult of wilderness”, based mostly on aesthetic appreciation of beautiful landscapes and the conservation of “pristine” natural areas, and the “gospel of eco-efficiency”, focused on using technological innovations to address the environmental and health impacts of modern agriculture, industrial activities and urbanisation.  

Understanding “environmentalism” as a concept for analysing how concerns for the environment are addressed, we argue that the way local landowners and other stakeholders engage with conservation payments has given rise to “the environmentalism of the paid”. This combines ecosystem stewardship with a demand for economic compensation in exchange for such stewardship. It involves a strategic engagement by local stakeholders with conservation payments largely designed and promoted by external institutions, but which are adapted and harmonised to local livelihood interests and development needs.  

Our research highlights how, despite being unintended, the environmentalism of the paid could become a key outcome of the growing policy focus on conservation payments.  

Payments for ecosystem services  

Governments in highly biodiverse countries such as Costa Rica, Mexico, Ecuador and China have rolled out national PES systems that provide local landowners with monetary or in-kind payments conditional on forest protection and improved management. These schemes have been complemented by hundreds of local and subnational initiatives developed by regional governments, companies and NGOs across the Global South. PES typically provide periodic payments to landowners – individuals or communities – through conditional short-term contracts, typically 3-5 years and often renewable. Such schemes’ popularity lies in their ability to achieve forest conservation and simultaneously raise participants’ income, delivering “win-win” outcomes.  

As the most prominent policy within the broader family of market-based instruments for ecosystem protection, such as carbon offsets, biodiversity offsets and eco-certifications, PES have attracted significant academic interest. They have also generated contentious debate around the potential benefits and pitfalls of relying on markets and economic incentives to address environmental challenges.  

The theoretical economic rationale for such payments was to promote environmental markets that offered landowners private economic benefit for the social benefits such as carbon capture and biodiversity protection generated by conserving forests. However, scholars from ecological economics, political ecology and other disciplines question the feasibility and desirability of such logic, raising concerns on practical, ethical, motivational and conceptual grounds. These include the risk of commodifying ecosystem services in ways that harm participants’ wellbeing, deepen social injustices or crowd out intrinsic conservation values. 

A growing body of empirical research now focuses on what happens when PES are parachuted into local contexts, and what can be learned from such local encounters. This explores ways in which local farmers and communities adapt, interpret and respond to conservation payments, and how this can generate unexpected meanings and practices.  

The environmentalism of the paid 

While strategic local engagement with conservation policies might also be present in other types of environmentalisms, we believe that the crucial role payments play, through PES policies, in shaping interactions within and between conservation stakeholders defines the “environmentalism of the paid” as a new and distinctive environmentalism. Although this can take different forms depending on local institutional conditions, including land tenure, and specific policy design and implementation features, we identify three salient attributes of this new type of environmentalism: 

• Hybrid motivations: Local landowners and communities who engage with PES emphasise the positive role that such payments play in protecting forests and enhancing their livelihoods. They therefore strive to adapt and reinterpret such payments according to local interests and needs. In this sense, participants are neither “noble savages” who protect forests out of purely intrinsic motivations, nor “homo economicus” whose decisions are based exclusively on economic terms. Rather, they lie somewhere in between these two extremes. 
• Differing perceptions of one policy: Local landowners and communities who engage with conservation payments come into contact with very different types of stakeholder, from local to global levels, including from the public, private and non-governmental sectors. This takes place through a seemingly single economic incentive that acquires different and potentially contradictory local meanings and values. For instance, although Mexico’s national hydrological PES scheme may be designed by central forestry commission experts to provide hydrological services, local communities may perceive it as a recognition of the historical costs of managing individual and communal forests, without focusing on water provision.  
• Diverse alliances: Strong alliances between stakeholders involved in PES strive to make these policies possible and desirable by acting as key champions in policy funding, design and implementation, and the dissemination of results. Such alliances might include, for example, networks of scholars not involved in conservation programme design or implementation, but who nurture the policy discourse by conducting, publishing and teaching related research.  

Understanding intersections between economy and environment 

Although the idea of “the environmentalism of the paid” draws on our long-term professional experience with PES schemes, the fate of this new concept is not exclusively and inextricably linked to the rise or fall of PES as a conservation policy. Other types of market-based policy also exist, and recent policy processes suggest a renewed interest in expanding the role of markets and economic incentives for protecting ecosystems and the benefits they provide humans. For example, following much talk and sluggish implementation in the past two decades, voluntary carbon offset projects that create markets for trading the carbon captured in forests and other ecosystems have risen dramatically in recent years. This has generated levels of hype and questioning of their feasibility and desirability reminiscent of the earliest phase of PES.   

Will we see increasing manifestations of “the environmentalism of the paid”, and if so, how might these reinforce or alter our current understanding of the concept? As other environmental payments and markets expand and consolidate, we hope our work can support reflection of pressing questions at the intersection between nature and the economy.

Further information

Corbera, E. & Izquierdo-Tort, S. (2023). “The Environmentalism of the Paid”. In The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology: A Companion in Honour of Joan Martinez-Alier (pp. 367-381). Cham: Springer International Publishing. 

Empirical research into PES in Mexico: Izquierdo-Tort et al. 2021, 2022  

Santiago Izquierdo-Tort completed the MPhil in Development Studies at ODID in 2014 and the DPhil in International Development in 2018, examining the long-term effects of PES in a region of Selva Lacandona (Chiapas, Mexico). He presented on Payments for Ecosystem Services at our alumni event, "Climate Change and Development: Insights from the ODID community", in June 2022.