Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Duke University

As some of the world's largest, longest lasting and most researched initiatives that reward individual and communal landowners for conserving forests and associated ecosystem services, Mexico's Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes provide a significant opportunity to examine questions of how, where, and by whom scholarship has been prod...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are widely applied incentive‐based instruments with diverse objectives that increasingly include biodiversity conservation. Yet, there is a gap in understanding of how to best assess and monitor programs’ biodiversity outcomes. We examined perceptions and drivers of engagement related to biodiversity monitoring...

The potential for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs to integrate nature’s diverse values into decision- making, and thereby support broader transformative change, is of increasing research interest. We analyze published reviews and case studies of PES from the IPBES Values Assessment to evaluate 1) how diverse values were (or were not)...

Approaches to financing biodiversity conservation tend to focus on funding gaps, but fail to address underlying political and economic drivers. We propose two strategies — tax reform and debt justice — to supercharge public financing for biodiversity and deflate harmful financial flows, while chipping away at the causes of state austerity.

Integrated conservation approaches (ICAs) are employed by governments, communities, and nongovernmental organizations worldwide seeking to achieve outcomes with dual benefits for biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation. Although ICAs are frequently implemented concurrently, interactions among ICAs and the synergies or trade‐offs that resu...

This chapter explores tensions between critique and engagement through the lens of four cases drawn from our differing experiences as critical scholars but holding in common direct engagement with marginalized communities and a focus on a particular conceptualization and approach to natural resource management: payments for ecosystem services (PES)...

Governments and conservation organisations often point to a large gap between existing financial resources and the resources needed to achieve biodiversity objectives. But the gap is almost always presented without context, as though biodiversity loss will be resolved through increased funding alone. To illuminate crucial pathways for transformativ...

Coffee farmers are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, yet recommended resilience strategies are often cost-prohibitive for smallholder producers and/or maladapted to local conditions and contexts. We collaborated with smallholder coffee cooperatives in Latin America to assess the feasibility of climate change resilience strategies...

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) initiatives, which provide financial incentives for management practices thought to increase the production of environmental benefits, have expanded across the global South since the late 1990s. These initiatives have thus far been conceptualized rather narrowly; by their early proponents as a novel economic in...

The national Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes of Mexico were originally based on the neoclassical economic theory that conceptualized ecosystems as factories whose various outputs can be quantified and converted to commodities. This model of PES clashed with an alternative theorization, Compensation for Ecosystem Services (CES), wit...

This study synthesizes findings from studies of the social and behavioral outcomes of collective payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs. The collective PES model is distinct from the conventional PES model in that by working with groups, not individuals, it breaks the direct relationship between an individual's consent to participate, the ec...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are now high in number, if not always in impact. When groups of users pay groups of service providers, establishing PES involves collective action. We study the creation of collective PES institutions, and their continuation, as group coordination. We use framed lab-in-field experiments with hydroservi...

Este informe detalla el proceso y las conclusiones, así como algunas posibles implicaciones políticas, del proyecto de investigación "Ligando los Usuarios y Proveedores de Servicios Ambientales en México", realizado por investigadores de la Universidad de Duke en colaboración con la Comisión Nacional Forestal de México (CONAFOR) Y financiado princi...

In this commentary we respond to Fletcher and Büscher's (2017) recent article in this journal on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) as neoliberal ‘conceit’. The authors claim that focusing attention on the micro-politics of PES design and implementation fails to expose an underlying neoliberal governmentality, and therefore only reinforces neoli...

In this commentary we respond to Fletcher and Büscher's (2017) recent article in this journal on Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) as neoliberal ‘conceit’. The authors claim that focusing attention on the micro-politics of PES design and implementation fails to expose an underlying neoliberal governmentality, and therefore only reinforces neoli...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly employed to address a range of environmental issues, including biodiversity conservation, watershed protection, and climate change mitigation. PES initiatives have gained momentum since the 1990s, and market enthusiasts have promoted them as not only cost effective but generative of social and...

Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes. Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, i...

This paper provides a broad evaluation of the implications of market-based conservation (MBC) strategies from economic, social and ecological perspectives. After reviewing the economic theory that underlies MBC initiatives, we develop a list of approaches that have been labeled as “market-based”, and categorize them according to the degree to which...

Natural resource managers are often expected to achieve both environmental protection and economic development even when there are fundamental trade‐offs between these goals. Adaptive management provides a theoretical structure for program administrators to balance social priorities in the presence of trade‐offs and to improve conservation targetin...

Mexico’s national payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs pay rural landholders for hydrological services, carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and improvement of agroforestry systems. The intention of the programs’ initial funders and designers was to create a PES program that would introduce market efficiency into environmental...

The Mexican national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, which provide financial incentives for rural landholders to conserve forest, were originally designed under the logic of market-based conservation. Based on a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnography of Mexico's PES programs, this article examines the process through which a national...

Incentive-based programs to reduce deforestation are expected to play an increasingly important role in global efforts to protect ecosystems and sequester carbon but their environmental effectiveness is not clear. We investigate program effectiveness and slippage in the context of Mexico's national payments for hydrological services program, which...

This document summarizes current findings from an evaluation of Mexico’s National Payments for Hydrological Services from 2003-2010 carried out by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Duke University, and Amherst College. Our evaluation seeks to understand the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the program, with the goal of e...

Prominent advocates of payments for ecosystem services (PES) contend that markets in biodiversity, carbon storage, and hydrological services can produce both conservation and sustainable development. In Mexico's national PES programs, however, conceived as models of market-based management, efficiency criteria have clashed with antipoverty goals an...

The brief summarizes an evaluation of the environmental effectiveness of Mexico's national Payments for Hydrological Services program, which compensates rural landowners for avoided deforestation. The evaluation found that in an early year of implementation Mexico?s program had a small to moderate but significant effect in reducing deforestation, i...

We compared how management approaches affected shade tree diversity, soil properties, and provisioning and carbon sequestration ecosystem services in three shade coffee cooperatives. Collectively managed cooperatives utilized less diverse shade, and pruned coffee and shade trees more intensively, than individual farms. Soil properties showed signif...

Background/Question/Methods It is estimated that deforestation is currently the source of approximately 20% of global green house gas emissions. Compensation for Avoided Deforestation (CAD) programs, which use the money from the purchase of carbon offsets to pay the owners of forest to conserve, have been proposed as a means to mitigate this cause...

Agricultural expansion by smallholder producers has been identified by management agencies as one of the main threats to the ecological integrity of La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, in Panama and Costa Rica. Promotion of cacao agroforestry has been proposed as a way to reduce the need for farmers to clear new land within the reserve. In order to reali...

This guide is for rural communities in Latin America and for those who work with them. It provides clear, step-by-step instructions for organizing a community environmental group, conducting participatory planning exercises and illustrated instructions for specific actions communities can take to address common environmental and environmental healt...