Payments for biodiversity conservation in the context of weak institutions: Comparison of three programs from Cambodia.

Clements, T., John, A., Nielsen, K., Dara, A., Setha, T., Milner-Gulland, E.J., 2010. Payments for biodiversity conservation in the context of weak institutions: Comparison of three programs from Cambodia. Ecological Economics 69 (6), 1283–1291.

I think this paper is a must-read. The authors compare three PES programs in Cambodia, where “land and resource rights are poorly defined, governance is poor, species populations are low and threats are high.” The three programs (direct payments to individuals for bird nest protection, community-based ecotourism payments and agri-environment rice farming payments) “vary in the extent to which payments were made at the individual or collective level,” and the authors compellingly argue that, “PES programs are best viewed as a tool in a broader process of strengthening institutions for conservation of biodiversity.” They conclude that, “PES programs can address two critical constraints, firstly by providing an incentive to reform institutional arrangements (for example clarification of property rights), and secondly by increasing the financial returns from collective management…where sustainable extraction alone would not be profitable.” While the paper is insightful, the authors fail to address a major challenge that they acknowledge, “escalating national land prices have dramatically increased incentives for land-grabbing both by villagers and in-migrants.” The in-migrant challenge strikes me as particularly challenging as several villages turned away in-migrants as part of their conservation strategy and this implies that not only will villages have to be incentivized to conserve, but over the long-run potential in-migrants will have to be provided with alternative development options to resource extraction on the “frontier”—a major social undertaking.