Gert Van Hecken

Household preferences for municipal water services in Nicaragua

Choice models and a referendum format contingent valuation survey are used to investigate household preferences for improved water services and decentralization levels (actual departmental administration vs. further decentralization to the municipality) in urban Matiguas, Nicaragua. Choice models suggest that households prefer the current departmental administration over municipal provision for service and capacity, but believe that the municipality would be more interested in improving services. Results also indicate that households are willing to pay an increment of at least 112 per cent above their current monthly water bill for reliable and safe drinking water services, regardless of administration type.

Neoliberal performatives and the ‘making’ of Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

This paper argues that Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) serve as a neoliberal performative act, in which idealized conditions are re-constituted by well-resourced and networked epistemic communities with the objective of bringing a distinctly instrumental and utilitarian relationality between humans and nature into existence. We illustrate the performative agency of hegemonic epistemic communities advocating (P)ES imaginaries to differentiate between the cultural construction of an ideal reality, which can and always will fail, and an external reality of actually produced effects. In doing so, we explore human agency to disobey performative acts to craft embodied and life-affirming relationships with nature.

Towards an Institutional Approach to Payments for Ecosystem Services: Perspectives from Two Nicaraguan Cases

Based on empirical evidence from two Nicaraguan case studies, we scrutinise the PES approach from both a supply and a demand-side perspective. First, our analysis of a silvopastoral PES project suggests that a combination of economic and non-economic factors motivated farmers to adopt the envisaged practices. The second case study assesses local willingness to pay for watershed services. Despite the existence of a demand for improved water services and a consciousness of upstream-downstream interdependencies, the feasibility of a locally financed PES system is undermined by local perceptions of agricultural externalities and entitlements. We conclude that a narrow market-based approach to PES may not adequately explain the typically complex dynamics operating in the field. A more flexible approach recognising the complex outcomes of institutional interplay may be more appropriate.

Crossfire: ‘Are we using payments for ecosystem services to transfer our responsibility for over-consuming natural resources onto poor farmers in the Global South?’

In the Global South, payments for environmental services (PES) have become increasingly popular as a tool to promote environmental conservation combined with poverty reduction. However, a number of concerns have been raised about this policy tool at the conceptual level. In the following debate, Gert Van Hecken and Kahlil Baker confront their views on this topic, with particular attention to issues of global environmental justice.

Microfinance plus for ecosystem services: a territorial perspective on Proyecto CAMBio in Nicaragua

Drawing from discussions on the panacea problem in microfinance and natural resource management, we scrutinize a ‘green microfinance plus’ programme – Proyecto CAMBio – in a specific setting in Nicaragua, focusing in particular on its interaction with local development pathways. The programme was designed to promote biodiversity-friendly land uses through the combination of credit provision, technical assistance and conditional economic incentives. In our case study, we highlight the focus on individual producers, the implicit targeting of more established medium-sized producers, and the uncritical promotion of a particular technical model of production. The project might thereby have failed to identify and revert some negative processes of environmental degradation and did not consciously engage with the dynamics and political arenas of sustainable development. We call for a more holistic territorial perspective that is conducive to more strategic thinking about the interactive socio-technical dynamics and ensuing opportunities and constraints for different producer types and technical-commercial models. Such strategic reflection is both inevitable and political, as it impacts on the opening and closing of avenues for more or less socially inclusive and environmentally sound development pathways.

ES Thinking and Some of Its Implications: A Critical Note from a Rural Development Perspective

Abstract This chapter looks at ecosystem services-thinking from the perspective of rural development and land-use dynamics in developing countries. In this context, the concept of ecosystem services seems to be prevalent as a foundation for market-based conservation and development policy tools such as Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). We assess a PES scheme in Nicaragua and show the importance of the broader context and the cognitive-motivational frameworks that influence land-use management, which go beyond the mere individual and economic rationale underlying mainstream PES. We link our findings to recent evidence that calls for a more integrated institutional approach to PES, emphasizing the need to take into account the complexity of rules and motivations present in the socio-ecological system with which such interventions inevitably interact.