PhD Oral Defense: A Critical Examination of Payments For Ecosystem Services (PES) as Applied in a Watershed Management Context
PhD Oral Defense of Vijay Krishnan Kolinjivadi, Department Of Bioresource Engineering.
Interest has grown significantly in advocating market-based policies for water resources management in response to: a) increasing global deterioration of watershed ecosystem services, b) complex and uncertain socio-economic and ecological drivers of land-use change in a watershed setting, and c) the need to respond to the criticism of an ‘implementation gap’ in achieving ‘Integrated Water Resource Management’ (IWRM). Chief among these policy mechanisms has been ‘Payments for Ecosystem Services’ (PES) which are theoretically premised as a voluntary and conditional transfer of incentives from ecosystem service beneficiaries to land-users to either improve the delivery of the identified ecosystem service(s) or more commonly to implement land-use practices which encourage those services.
The current interest over PES mechanisms for natural resource management has been advanced by an argument of greater efficiency compared with preservationist ‘no touch’ policies or community-based conservation initiatives which lack conditional obligations over land-use practices. The logic underpinning the economic valuation of ecosystem services in PES schemes refers to the internalisation of social costs associated with the degradation of ecological resources as new commodities for exchange within the market system, as the best arbiter of efficient decision-making.
This research provides a critical conceptual and empirical analysis of PES under the logic of market-based principles for advancing integrated and adaptive water resource management.