There is growing interest in payment for environmental services (PES) as a means to secure improved natural resource management in cases where the land manager cannot capture the resulting benefits.
Among the reasons for this interest are its potential for improving upon past mechanisms that have had uneven success, and the possibility that it will offer impoverished rural landowners a market through which they can raise their incomes while also preserving the natural resource base.
Many researchers, donor organizations and advocates for the poor have become enthusiastic about the prospects for PES to play the triple role of conserving the natural resource base, raising land productivity, and alleviating poverty, but there are legitimate fears that PES risks becoming just another development fad because of enthusiasm about its potential outpacing analysis of what it can actually achieve.
Perhaps the most critical element in making PES work and provide benefits to poor land managers is to identify and mobilize users of environmental services who are willing and able to pay land managers to provide services, with assurance that the service is actually provided.
While this aspect of PES sometimes is overlooked or is assumed to be feasible, historically it is has been the main impediment to development of environmental service markets.
If current programs focus too much on the potential benefits to the natural resource base and the welfare of environmental service providers but overlook environmental service buyers, there is a great risk that donor-backed PES programs will not have a solid foundation in demand for the service and will not have lasting results.