Doctoral Dissertation Research: Incentives, Livelihoods, and Forest Ecology Related to Payments for Ecosystems Services

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This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the ability of conservation payments to achieve their intended goals of both improving ecosystem health and enhancing rural livelihoods. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are thought to influence conservation via payments to those who own or manage land. Many programs pay for services provided by forests, such as water filtration or carbon sequestration, or for management practices assumed to provide these services. Despite the rapid growth of hundreds of PES programs across the globe, there is little consensus regarding their development or conservation successes, leading many scholars, conservationists, and development practitioners to call for interdisciplinary investigations into these initiatives. This project will provide new insights regarding how PES initiatives affect forest and agricultural ecosystem health and also the lives and governance structures of rural participants. The project will test assumptions that incentivized activities or increased forest cover necessarily equate to improved ecosystem services and benefits to land users, because it will employ a quasi-experimental design that compares the actions of participants and non-participants to examine what might have occurred if PES interventions had not taken place. Project results will contribute new information and insights to discussions about the world's largest PES program, the United Nations' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative, which is being implemented in developing nations across the globe, because studies of existing PES programs can inform the choices of potential participants and shape REDD+'s currently contested design. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.The doctoral student will undertake a political ecological analysis of a PES program by exploring the connections between social and ecological systems in Guatemala and by linking local practices to international calls for conservation. She will use a mixed methods approach of semi-structured interviews, livelihood surveys, and forestry plots to determine how payments affect who makes forest management decisions; what decisions are made; benefits and costs associated with different forest uses; and impacts on ecosystem services. Comparisons across land tenure patterns, socioeconomic situations, and deforestation rates will illustrate what factors influence the ability of PES programs to achieve their goals. Focusing on the measureable ecosystem services of carbon capture and agrobiodiversity in conjunction with interviews and surveys, the student will examine assumptions that incentivized activities necessarily equate to improved ecosystem services and benefits to land users. She also will investigate the capacity for these programs to empower or dispossess rural communities by changing existing systems of governance and access to the benefits of land.