Developing Pro-Poor Markets for Environmental Services in the Philippines

The aims of this study are to conduct a preliminary assessment of the development of markets for environmental services in the Philippines with a focus on the distribution of costs and benefits among different stakeholder groups, in light of widespread public concern about the impacts of market based instruments on the poor. In practice, most instruments for marketing environmental services are in the early stages of development and implementation, therefore the assessment will be limited to design, introduction and preliminary impacts of economic instruments including its impacts on people's livelihood and revenue generation for sustainable development.

There are three objectives of the study (1) to document all efforts undertaken in developing markets for environmental services in the Philippines, (2) to conduct a rapid assessment of institutional mechanisms that have evolved in the development of markets for environmental services, (3) to develop and test a robust framework for monitoring and evaluating the efficacy of markets for environmental services in environmental, economic and social aspects. 

Within a socio-economic framework, two case studies were used for assessment of institutional mechanisms and a further two case studies for testing the framework of assessing the efficacy of markets. To gather the information, the main methods were key informant interviews and secondary data collection from published and gray literature and outputs of previous projects.