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

这一博士论文研究项目将调查保护资金实现其预期目标的能力，即改善生态系统健康和改善农村生计。生态系统服务的付费(PES)被认为通过向拥有或管理土地的人付费来影响保护。许多项目为森林提供的服务付费，如水过滤或碳封存，或者为假定提供这些服务的管理实践付费。尽管全球数百个PES项目迅速增长，但对于它们的开发或保护成功与否，几乎没有达成共识，这导致许多学者、自然资源保护者和发展实践者呼吁对这些倡议进行跨学科调查。该项目将提供关于生态系统倡议如何影响森林和农业生态系统健康以及农村参与者的生活和治理结构的新见解。该项目将测试激励活动或增加森林覆盖率必然等同于改善生态系统服务和土地使用者受益的假设，因为它将采用准实验设计，比较参与者和非参与者的行动，以检查如果没有进行生态系统干预可能会发生什么。项目成果将为关于世界上最大的森林砍伐和森林退化计划的讨论提供新的信息和见解，联合国的减少森林砍伐和森林退化排放(REDD+)倡议正在全球发展中国家实施，因为对现有PES计划的研究可以为潜在参与者的选择提供信息，并塑造目前正在角逐的REDD+S的设计。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生能够建立强大的独立研究事业。博士生将通过探索危地马拉社会和生态系统之间的联系，并将当地做法与国际保护呼声联系起来，对PES项目进行政治生态分析。她将使用半结构化访谈、生计调查和林业地块的混合方法来确定支付如何影响谁做出森林管理决策；做出什么决定；与不同森林使用相关的收益和成本；以及对生态系统服务的影响。对土地保有权模式、社会经济状况和森林砍伐率的比较将说明哪些因素影响PES计划实现其目标的能力。将重点放在碳捕获和农业生物多样性等可衡量的生态系统服务上，结合采访和调查，学生将检验激励活动必然等同于改善生态系统服务和对土地使用者的好处的假设。她还将调查这些方案通过改变现有的治理制度和获得土地利益的机会来赋予或剥夺农村社区的能力。

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.