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Abstract
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs have come into widespread use in recent decades. PES incentivize land managers to account for the value of ecosystem services (ES) that provide public benefits in their private decision-making. As programs can provide cash or in-kind incentives to rural land managers, they are also promoted for their potential to contribute to rural development, especially where economic opportunities may be otherwise limited. PES programs can vary significantly in the ES they target, the incentives they provide, the activities they incentivize, as well as in their scale, governance and participating actors. In this dissertation, I use a social-ecological systems framework to evaluate how the governance of PES influences both social and environmental outcomes to determine if trade-offs are occurring between multiple outcome types. I used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate PES impacts across scales, ranging from reviews of PES around the world to the impacts of particular PES interventions in rural Costa Rica. Specifically, I employed literature reviews, focus groups and semi-structured interviews to generate qualitative data and ecosystem services modeling, surveys and avian community composition analysis to generate quantitative data. My analyses revealed a range of positive social and environmental impacts of PES. Globally, I found that community engagement in local PES programs are improving social capital, community assets and program legitimacy. In rural Costa Rica, I found that local, community-based PES are improving the provisioning of multiple ES that are also directly benefiting local communities. Although the national PES program in Costa Rica is not generating significant ES benefits, cash payments are benefiting program participants and these cash payments may be enabling additional conservation activities on lands not under contract. Therefore, although PES may not be consistently generating win-wins for people and the environment, trade-offs are not inevitable. Additional monitoring and evaluation of a range of potential program impacts may help expand the evidence base regarding the conditions under which synergies can be maximized between social and environmental outcomes.