ABSTRACT
The degradation of Southeast Asian ecosystems is progressing at a rapid pace. Large forest areas have disappeared or are threatened by illegal logging, mining and conversion into agro-industrial plantations. River basins are increasingly polluted by agrochemicals, industrial pollutants and sediments, and mountain watersheds have been degraded by unsustainable management practices. The major reason identified by economic theory is that these ecosystems generally belong to the category of ‘common-pool resources’ (CPRs), where there is intense rivalry of consumption, while it is costly to exclude individuals from using the resources for their own benefit or to prevent them from reaping the benefits from their protection (Ahlheim and Neef 2006). While the most common approach in Southeast Asia has been for governments to impose a command-and-control regime of environmental governance (e.g., Neef et al. 2003; Forsyth and Walker 2008), the environmental economics literature suggests a number of different policy measures to address such problems and encourage environment-friendly action. A conventional environmental policy tool is the taxation of activities that are considered environmentally harmful. Yet, given the high number of potential users of a typical CPR, such as a rainforest, a tropical wetland or a river basin, administering such a tax – including its enforcement and monitoring – would be difficult and the transaction costs would be prohibitively high (Ahlheim and Neef 2006). Economists have therefore suggested alternative policy instruments that emphasize economic incentives (Coase 1960; Engel et al. 2008). One approach is to encourage biodiversity conservation and environmentally benign agricultural practices by rewarding activities that preserve CPRs and their associated ‘ecosystem services’ instead of taxing their consumption (Ahlheim and Neef 2006). Such ecosystem services include, for instance, the supply of wild food, fodder, medicinal plants and energy (provisioning services), carbon sequestration, climate regulation and water purification (regulating services), and spiritual, historical and recreational values and benefits (cultural services). Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) hold the promise of being more effective in halting environmental degradation in ecologically fragile areas than conventional command-and-control approaches that have largely failed in fostering resource 377conservation, particularly in the context of Southeast Asia (Neef and Thomas 2009). PES have been most prominently defined as “a (1) voluntary transaction where (2) a well-defined ES (or corresponding land use) is (3) being ‘bought’ by a (minimum one) ES buyer (4) from a (minimum one) ES provider (5) if and only if ES provision is secured (conditionality)” (Wunder 2008, 280). Local and global demand for enhancing ecosystem services is steadily rising against the background of climate change and increased global ecological vulnerability. Hence, the idea of providing public support for conservation programs and for direct payments to land managers maintaining or restoring such services is slowly gaining currency among national policy-makers and in the international donor community (Rosales 2003; Tomich et al. 2004; Engel et al. 2008; Wunder et al. 2008a; Neef and Thomas 2009; Gómez-Baggethun et al. 2010). Yet the rationale for Payments for Ecosystem Services has been the subject of some controversy since the late 1990s. While the proponents count on new impulses for global biodiversity protection and environmental conservation and even expect positive effects in terms of poverty alleviation and sustainable ‘green’ development, the critics of such market-based concepts and instruments fear the transformation of biodiversity and ecosystem services into marketable commodities, associated with the enclosure and commodification of nature and its biological diversity in the sense of a neoliberal form of “Green Capitalism” (e.g., McAfee 1999; McGregor et al. 2014). Critical scholars and human rights NGOs have also expressed concerns that PES may restrict poor and landless rural people’s access to natural resources that are crucial for sustaining their livelihoods (e.g., McElwee et al. 2014).
