Payment for environmental services: alleviating the conflict of parks versus people

Abstract

The “parks versus people” conflict is a result of the establishment of protected areas (PAs) that often restrict access to biological resources by the human population, mainly in developing countries. Payment for environmental services (PES) is one of the several strategies that have been developed and implemented in order to mitigate this conflict. This study aimed to evaluate whether PES could smooth the “parks and people” conflict through the analysis of five case studies from different regions and social-environmental contexts. The results have shown that PES may contribute effectively towards conflict resolution, although it was not the main objective. However, the PES results differed between cases due to attributes such as local environmental conditions, local activities and involvement capacity of both the population and local government. Some characteristics must be considered in order to have efficient results, both in biodiversity and environmental services conservation, and in the development of populations involved towards maintaining PES continuity. It is necessary to consider PES joint strategies to improve the process efficiency from diagnoses to decisionmaking.