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Sven Wunder: Environmental Services and the Public Domain
Nowadays, environmental services are on everybody’s lips. But one commonly expressed fear is that they would be monopolized for private profit, leaving behind societies empty-handed: environmental services could allegedly flow out of Latin America’s open veins into the hands of multinational companies and their imperialistic marionettes. Water is often looked to for comparison. There are strong political currents in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and beyond, trying to ensure that all environmental services are solidly held in public hands. Sometimes this is even written directly into the constitution. Consequently, only the state may also be entitled to make payments for environmental services (PES).
This populist discourse, however, ignores certain subtleties in diagnosis and strategy. Why are PES emerging on the scene in the first place? Because in spite of beautifully written laws, Latin American states have de facto proved widely unable to fulfill their titanic environmental mandates. PES is trying to change that, by actively engaging civil society in environmental management, including NGOs, water users, farmers, and the private sector. When a brewery is paying upstream farmers to reduce erosion and streamflow sedimentation, what logical role has the state vis-à-vis the environmental service generated? Frankly speaking: none whatsoever. State-claimed “ownership” of environmental services here becomes a political tool of controlling civil society, without prospects of doing society any good.
Fundamentally, environmental services are not only global benefits like carbon and biodiversity, but also watershed protection (quality, quantity, seasonality), pollination, storm and landslide protection, recreation and landscape beauty. These are domestic environmental services, fully generated, consumed and controlled by civil society -- whether that is constitutional or not… Even in countries where public PES schemes have been working for many years (Costa Rica, Mexico), national policies have continuously been cross-fertilized by co-existing private initiatives. Nationalizing all environmental management is certainly the worst we could do for the environment.
Correspondingly, lawmakers and public servants alike often face difficulties when leaving their hermetic omnipotent world to face the ugly on-the-ground realities. Deforestation in Latin America is mostly de jure illegal but de facto tolerated. Hence, governments will deny paying landholders to obey the law, even a defunct one. Yet, they are also unable to protect the environmental service. They are caught in no man’s land where neither sticks nor carrots can be applied – all the while deforestation continues. Ironically, if they on top impede civil society from taking action where they themselves have proved impotent, governments can become genuine warrantors of environmental stalemate.
However, that needs not be so. In Costa Rica, deforestation is illegal, yet PES-enrolled landholders do receive conservation payments: not primarily “for obeying the law” (i.e. not deforesting), but for not harvesting timber, making firebreaks, signposting, and active monitoring of third-party intrusion. Similar creative ways to circumvent this problem by merging incentives and command-and-control have been used in US and EU agro-environmental programs, thus providing compliance cost-subsidies to landholders making an additional effort to reclaim legal grounds. Cross-compliance instruments can also be powerful, i.e. making everything from bank credits to public household subsidies and land-tenure regularization dependent on environmental legality -- a tool that only incipiently is being used in Latin America. To make real progress in safeguarding environmental services for the common good, we will need a public domain that is delimited with caution and realism, and policy makers who descend from their rostrum of ideological discourses to understand what pragmatic changes are needed to achieve tangible results.
Sven Wunder, Center for International Forestry Research – CIFOR, contact: s.wunder(at)cgiar.org
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