DSpace at VNU: Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam

Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam Pamela McElwee a, *, Tuyen Nghiem b, Hue Le b, Huong Vu b, Nghi Tran c a Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, USA Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Viet Nam c Tropenbos International Vietnam, Hue, Viet Nam b a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Available online 30 September 2014 Forest and water protection once relied primarily on regulatory means to achieve conservation ends, but an explosion of market-based and neoliberal approaches to environmental policy now depend instead on the creation and harnessing of financial instruments to value environmental goods and provide the funding needed for their preservation Payments for environmental services (PES), which provides incentives for soil, water and forest conservation from users of services to those who provide them, is one of the most well-known of these approaches However, many challenges remain for PES as a policy approach, and this paper explores how PES schemes have been implemented in practice in developing countries, how well they fit with descriptions of neoliberal environmental governance, and how these policies are being shaped by rural actors to make them more favourable to social, cultural or economic priorities in local areas The paper shows that seemingly neoliberal policies like PES are actually a mix of both market economic incentives and regulatory approaches, and thus should not be labelled solely “neoliberal” per se Further, much of this variegation in PES policy has resulted from active engagement of rural actors in shaping the parameters of what parts of neoliberal policy are acceptable, and what are not, and data from a Vietnam case study emphasize this point Finally, the paper shows how key goals of neoliberal approaches, namely efficiency and conditionality, are often actually the weakest components of PES schemes, in Vietnam and elsewhere, particularly when they clash with local concerns over equity, which should pose a rethinking of how to understand PES success The article concludes that PES plans should not be considered exclusively neoliberal per se, as they may in fact strengthen both state regulation and local participation and involvement in rural environmental management at the same time © 2014 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved Keywords: Payments for environmental services Forestry Markets Neoliberalism Conservation Ecosystem services Introduction Environmental protection measures once relied primarily on state-led regulatory means to achieve conservation ends, but an explosion of new policies now depend instead on decentralized, often privatized, approaches to valuing environmental goods and providing the capital needed for their preservation Often labelled as “neoliberal” or “market-based” forms of environmental governance, these policies range widely in focus and scope, but share in common a goal of using economic incentives (either for positive environmental services like habitat preservation or for negative environmental externalities like pollution) in the hopes that the market provides a more efficient, less expensive policy outcome * Corresponding author E-mail address: pamela.mcelwee@rutgers.edu (P McElwee) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2014.08.003 0743-0167/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved Payments for environmental services (PES), which provides funding from users of ecosystem services to those who provide them, is one of the more prominent and widespread of these market-based policies While PES as a conservation tool has a long history in rural areas in developed countries (such as the Conservation Reserve program in the US, the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, or similar environmental stewardship plans in Australia and New Zealand), PES approaches have only more recently expanded into poorer developing countries of the global South On the one hand, this expansion has prompted some amount of concern that these rural poor could be unduly harmed by neoliberal market-based policies, which might exclude access to resources or induce unwanted commoditization in communities that are not prepared for such approaches (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; McAfee, 2012a; Redford and Adams, 2009) On the other hand, rural farmers and other actors in developing countries often have active ability to protest against, 424 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 influence and otherwise modify policy implementation to better improve local outcomes, and have actively done so for many years, including market-based and neoliberal policies like PES (McAfee and Shapiro-Garza, 2010; Ostrom and Basurto, 2010) Thus, there is an important need to understand how PES schemes have been implemented in practice in developing countries and how well they fit with descriptions of neoliberal environmental governance, and how these policies are being shaped by rural actors to make them more favourable to social, cultural or economic priorities in local areas This paper is aimed at both of these goals, and contributes to the growing literature on PES by: 1) reviewing overall PES policies in the global South, and concluding that most cannot be described as true markets or clearly neoliberal policies; and 2) asserting that one major reason why PES projects have been unable to function as strict market instruments is due to the strong influence of participants, who often place high priority on non-market values like equity and justice in their involvement with PES, and who have been successful in many instances in changing PES projects to better reflect these values In this paper, data and research from Vietnam, as well as a survey of the literature from other developing countries, is used to identify several key themes in how PES has been implemented and how outcomes have been shaped, paying particular attention to what we have identified as the “contested” nature of neoliberalism First, the paper briefly reviews the existing research on PES in the global South through examination of how PES instruments have developed, who is involved, how payments are transferred and used, and what the known impacts have been This review shows that seemingly neoliberal policies like PES are actually a mix of both market economic incentives and regulatory approaches, and thus should not be labelled solely “neoliberal” per se Secondly, much of this variegation in PES policy has resulted from active engagement of rural actors in shaping the parameters of what parts of neoliberal policy are acceptable, and what are not Data from both reviews of the existing literature and the Vietnam case study emphasize this point Thirdly, the paper shows how a key goal of neoliberal approaches, namely market-led efficiency in the allocation of resources, is often actually the weakest components of PES schemes, in Vietnam and elsewhere, particularly when efficiency clashes with local concerns over equity, which should pose a rethinking of how to understand PES success The article concludes that PES plans should not be considered exclusively neoliberal per se, as they may in fact strengthen both state regulation and local participation and involvement in rural environmental management at the same time That is, not only are PES schemes not clearly neoliberal, but active community and government involvement has strongly influenced this outcome Given this, more attention should be paid to moving PES studies towards acknowledging the contingent, contested, and often complicated structures and outcomes of so-called neoliberal approaches Background: neoliberalism and PES in rural areas of the developing world Studies of the impact of neoliberal processes on environmental management have rapidly expanded in fields such as geography, anthropology and rural sociology in recent years Originating in concerns over global structural adjustment programs and debt repayment policies that began to be implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, scholars have documented negative impacts on land use, labour, food security, and health from these policies (Cupples, 2004; Gueorguieva and Bolt, 2003; Mazur, 2004) Neoliberal processes have since been theorized to encompass far more than simple market expansionism, and David Harvey's identification of neoliberalism as “accumulation by dispossession” is one of the most well-known (Harvey, 2010) In Harvey's view, neoliberalism involves a series of steps, all of which are fundamental for the accumulation of capital in a global system These include privatization of public goods, whether these are social safety nets or environmental commons; financialization of everything, particularly inasmuch as speculative trading can be facilitated; and a hollowing out of state institutions such that the state becomes a handmaiden for capitalism and the facilitator of increasing income transfers to the very wealthy (Harvey, 2007; Ortner, 2011) Despite this broad definition, some commonalities in the neoliberalism literature specifically related to nature and environmental governance have emerged (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2013; Bakker, 2010; Castree, 2010) So-called “neoliberal natures” have been characterized as “as the increasing management of natural resources and environmental issues through market-oriented arrangements, by off-loading rights and responsibilities to private firms, civil society groups and individual citizens, with state power, in its national and transnational incarnations, providing the rules under which markets operate” (Pellizzoni, 2011, p 796) This expansion of voluntary, market, private or decentralized approaches to governance has resulted in a series of new environmental policies that have emerged and which have been labelled as broadly ‘neoliberal’ (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006; Liverman and Vilas, 2006) These include emissions trading programs for pollution (Stavins, 2003); incentive payments to farmers for refraining from use of sensitive lands (NCEE, 2001); wetland mitigation banking (Robertson, 2004); certification schemes for commodities, like sustainable timber or seafood (Cashore et al., 2003; Humphreys, 2009; Konefal, 2013); and tradable permits and quotas for commodities such as fish (Mansfield, 2006; McCay, 2004) At least three main areas of concern can be identified in the neoliberal natures literature First, there is concern over commodification, namely the expansion of capital into new commodities that were previously unmarketed (like carbon or biodiversity) or into areas that were once considered public goods (such as water) (Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Igoe and Brockington, 2007) Scholars have argued that this commodification has in turn has extended territorialization of control over resources resulting in loss of access, particularly for poorer peoples (Adams et al., 2013; Büscher et al., 2012; Corson, 2011; Kosoy and Corbera, 2010) Thus privatization of resources often follows commodification, through alienation and new forms of control of resources, for example through private land tenure rather than commons (Mansfield, 2007a; McAfee, 2012a, 2012b) Finally, capitalization and the ascendance of the private sector has been facilitated by deregulation and retreat of the state as barriers to capital movement (Heynen et al., 2007; Heynen and Robbins, 2005), and a subsequent loss of attention to Keynesian concerns over inequality and redistribution (Fletcher, 2012) Much of this critique of neoliberal environmental policy has been grounded in concerns over the disproportionate impact of neoliberal policies on the poor, namely increased inequality in pursuit of efficiency (Haglund, 2011; Prudham, 2004) With these concerns as backdrop, in the following sections, this paper looks specifically at PES policies as a form of market-driven environmental governance and surveys the ways in which these may or may not fit the above definitions of neoliberalism; assesses if the outcomes of existing PES schemes appear to be resulting in inequality and accumulation as other neoliberal approaches have been accused of; and looks at the ways in which PES may facilitate spaces for local participation and pushback against neoliberalizing tendencies The paper then later uses specific data from a case study of implementation of PES in Vietnam to further these arguments P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 2.1 PES as neoliberal environmental policy? PES is often pointed to as an example of neoliberal environmental governance par excellence and is currently the most widespread land conservation policy using market-based approaches PES developed from calls by many economists to value non-market goods, following from the work of Pigou and Coase on transaction costs, property rights and externalities (Baumol and Oates, 1971; Coase, 1960; van Noordwijk et al., 2012); such policies would facilitate market exchange to value scarce resources in an efficient manner (Hahn and Stavins, 1992) Interest in the expansion of market mechanisms also dovetailed with new attention to ecosystem services, emphasized by reports like the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which identified a number of services that  mez-Baggethun et al., were undervalued in national accounts (Go 2010; MEA, 2005; Tallis et al., 2008; TEEB, 2009) Using market forces to generate conservation or ecosystem services payments was to “translate external, non-market values of the environment into real financial incentives for local actors to provide such services” (Engel et al., 2008, p 664) The fundamental premise was that it is only a matter or economics, of getting the ‘prices right,’ to make resource conservation work (McAfee, 2012a; Muradian et al., 2010) PES schemes have rapidly expanded in size and scope across the global South in the past 15 years, after having first evolved in developed countries (Wunder et al., 2008; Wunder and WertzKanounnikoff, 2009) PES has now become so popular and ubiquitous that varied organizations from state governments representing a range of political spectrums, to large donors like the World Bank, to conservation organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and poverty-focused NGOs like Oxfam, have all lined up in support of using the market to pay for environmental services (G Bennett et al., 2013; Kossoy and Guigon, 2012; Sandbrook et al., 2013) An early definition of PES emphasized that these should be voluntary economic transactions between buyers and sellers of a well-defined environmental service in which some sort of provisioning was offered in exchange for some type of conditional payment (Derissen and Latacz-Lohmann, 2013; Engel et al., 2008; Wunder, 2005) However, subsequent research has shown that this idealized definition is not commonly encountered in the real world, and that there is striking variety in the scale and scope of projects and policies that fall under the PES label (Muradian et al., 2010; Pirard, 2012a; Vatn, 2010) A survey of the range of these manifold PES arrangements is outlined below The scale of PES polices varies dramatically across the global South, with strong regional trends Several countries have national PES policies which apply to tens of thousands of participants and have been running for a few years; the most well known of these are in Costa Rica (Chomitz et al., 1999; Sanchez-Azofeifa et al., 2007), Mexico (Corbera et al., 2009; Kosoy et al., 2008), Ecuador (Wunder n, 2008), and China (J Liu et al., 2008; Weyerhaeuser and Alba et al., 2005) Newer national-level programs are also emerging in Brazil (Pokorny et al., 2012), South Africa (Turpie et al., 2008), and Vietnam (McElwee, 2012; T T T Pham et al., 2008; To et al., 2012) The size of these national-scale projects varies widely; Mexico has 2.5 million hectares of land enrolled its Program of Payments for Environmental Services (PSAB) program (FONAFIFO et al., 2012), while China's Sloping Land Conversion Program has over 12 million under contracts (M T Bennett, 2008; J Xu et al., 2006) (see Table 1.) There are also an increasing number of smaller-scale PES plans, often initiated by donors or conservation organizations, such as for biodiversity or wildlife conservation (Clements et al., 2010; Milne and Niesten, 2009; Sommerville et al., 2010a); watershed protection (Branca et al., 2011; Huang and Upadhyaya, 2007; Pirard, 2012b); or carbon sequestration (Boyd et al., 2007; Reynolds, 2012) Overall, Latin America has by far the largest number of PES 425 projects (Balvanera et al., 2012), followed by Asia, and finally Africa with a limited number of PES projects, particularly at national levels (G Bennett et al., 2013; Egoh et al., 2012; Katoomba Group, 2009; Ecosystem Marketplace, 2008) Because many ecological provisioning services that are considered to be most valuable for human sustainability, such as water regulatory services, biodiversity conservation, and carbon storage are found predominantly in rural areas, PES projects have focused on rural landscapes and natures (Zhang et al., 2007; Kroeger and Casey, 2007) By far the most commonly encountered PES schemes in developing countries are for watershed management for water flow, quality, or flood control (Bond and Mayers, 2010; Brauman et al., 2007; Brouwer et al., 2011; Huang et al., 2009; Stanton et al., 2010) Forest protection for ecosystem services, including water flow, but also encompassing biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration, comes in a close second (Madsen et al., 2010) Other environmental services in the global South include soil erosion control, such as in China's Desertification Combating Program (C Liu et al., 2013); energy production, such as for hydropower generation in Costa Rica (Blackman and Woodward, 2010); and wildlife conservation, such as protection of birds in Cambodia and Bolivia (Asquith et al., 2008; Clements et al., 2010) Agriculturally-based PES, such as promotion of improved farming, has been included in several large-scale pro€ rner et al., grams, such as the Proambiente program in Brazil (Bo 2007) and the Sloping Land Conversion Program in China (Yin and Zhao, 2012), but attention to services from agricultural landscapes appears less frequently than it does in developed countries, where such approaches are more common PES programs are very diverse in terms of users and suppliers, and it is in these definitions that the first questions about whether or not PES is ‘neoliberal’ can be asked Because many rural residents of developing countries who might be asked to conserve such ecosystem functions are often relatively poor, PES policies have been promoted as a potential winewin to transfer money from wealthier users of energy, water and food supplies (Rosa et al., 2004); such development-oriented objectives for PES not closely fit with the more capital-oriented objectives of many neoliberal policies There are a fair number of PES projects that are aimed at direct users, like water-consuming businesses and households, whereby national or subnational authorities serve as intermediaries to coordinate the transfer of user fees to service supplying households, as is the case in some of the Mexico programs (Goldman-Benner et al., 2012) But a great many PES projects have not focused on privatized buyers and sellers per se; indeed, for many large scale national projects, users/buyers are often taxpayers in general Some of these projects are therefore not technically voluntary, as they involve mandatory use of general taxes, rents, or user fees on all citizens (Pagiola et al., 2010b), thus making PES more akin to regulatory approaches than a true market mechanism Many donor-supported PES projects also involve the transfer of funding and resources to service providers and not involve direct ‘users’ of these services at all (T T T Pham et al., 2010; Sommerville et al., 2010b) Thus, in the vast majority of existing PES schemes in developing countries, there remain significant roles for national and subnational governmental intermediaries, in addition to donors and NGOs, which is not an outcome typically associated with ‘neoliberal’ policies (Vatn, 2010) Suppliers also range widely, including those that are truly voluntary, as is the case in Costa Rica where land-owners volunteer for the Pago por Servicios Ambientales project (Steed, 2007) There are as well more compulsory PES approaches, where all residents in a given area are required to undertake some conservation action in return for support, as is the case in the Sloping Land Conversion Program in China (M T Bennett, 2008) There is also variation in the 426 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 Table Examples of payment types and levels across developing country PES experiences Country Name of program Costa Rica Pago por Servicios Ambimentales (PSA) Scope Ecosystem service targeted Buyers/sellers Payment levels Market-based? ~800,000 Forest cover B:Government S: Landowning households; indigneous communities; legal entities ~ US$64 to 80/ha for forest protection; ~US$200-300/ha for reforestation No: funded primarily by fuel tax surcharge and donors; a few private transactions with hydropower companies No: funded by national water fees, government budget transfers and donors Mexico Program of Payments ~2.5 mill for Environmental Services (PSAB) US$27 and up/ha for individuals; more for communities Ecuador Socio Bosque US$30 and below/ha China “Grain for Green”/ Sloping Land Conversion Program Payments for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) Vietnam Primarily B:Government degraded watershed (state forest agency) S: Landholders (individuals & communities) 868,000 Forest cover; high B:Government altitude grasslands S: Rural households or communities 12 million Sloping cropland B: Government conversion to forest S: Rural households million Forest cover No: funded by government budget transfers US$20e40 equiv/ha, up to No: funded by government max of $600/ha in watersheds budget transfers US$20 and below/ha B: State-owned electricity, water and tourism companies S: Households, communities & government landowners No: funded by mandatory payment levels on public water and energy use n-Cascante, & Miranda, 2013; Sources: (Corbera, Kosoy, & Tuna, 2007b; de Koning et al., 2011; FONAFIFO, CONAFOR, Ministry of Environment (2012); Porras, Barton, Chaco Wunder et al., 2008; Yin and Zhao, 2012) type of people who enrol as suppliers of services While an original Coasean-type market policy would have emphasized secure property rights as a precondition for suppliers to enter a PES market (Muradian et al., 2010, p 1203), the real world shows a mix of property conditions in PES participation In some places lack of property rights and tenure has been a barrier to participation (Bremer et al., 2014), while in other schemes suppliers of PES not necessarily have to have firm property rights, or even individual ones For example, there are cases of PES being implemented on public lands and with communities who not yet have secure land titles, although these present special challenges (Mahanty et al., 2013) Overall the literature does seem to emphasize however that particularly in cases of voluntary PES, larger and wealthier landowners tend to be the ones with higher rates of participation (Zbinden and Lee, 2005).1 Poorer households in general appear to be less active in PES, due to higher transaction costs, less labour, less capital and less capacity, among other reasons (Dougill et al., 2012; Hegde and Bull, 2011; Jindal et al., 2012; Landell-Mills and Porras, 2002; Pokorny et al., 2012) This has led some national PES programs to use more explicit social or environmental targeting criteria for PES participation, such as in Costa Rica where indigenous communities and female landowners are now favoured (Porras et al., 2013b) The payments themselves that are used in many PES project range in both size and kind (Adhikari and Boag, 2013; Pattanayak et al., 2010) Overall, there are very few instances of direct market mechanisms that set variable prices for PES schemes in developing countries (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012; McElwee, 2012; Pirard, 2012a; Prasetyo et al., 2009; Shapiro-Garza, 2013a) Instead, most PES payments in the global South are determined by local or national laws, and in this we see an additional departure from orthodox neoliberalism (Adhikari and Boag, 2013; Ferraro et al., 2012;  mez-Baggethun and Barton, 2013) As evidenced in Table 1, many Go Researchers also continue to study whether PES can enhance participants' access to land tenure (e.g by forming financial means to establish secure claims) (Bremer et al., 2014; Porras et al., 2013) Reviews on this question are mixed; some studies assert that forest tenure has been enhanced through participation in PES programs (Lawlor et al., 2013) while other reports are inconclusive on this question (Awono et al., 2014; Corbera et al., 2007b; Duchelle et al., 2014; Resosudarmo et al., 2014; Sunderlin et al., 2014) national-level PES policies require central government transfers, or other forms of state support, to make payments to participating households; sources for such central government transfers include fuel taxes and obligatory water and energy fees Many payment levels are set somewhat arbitrarily in developing country PES programs, often dependent on academic studies of opportunity costs or willingness to pay, hydrological flows, or other criteria (Balvanera et al., 2012; Porras et al., 2013b) There are only a handful of PES projects in developing countries that use actual market mechanisms, like auctions, to set PES pricing (Ajayi et al., 2012; Jindal et al., 2013), unlike many developed countries where such markets are more common There have been few studies that have tried to compare the relative lessons and successes from different types and forms of PES payments, so this is still an area of on-going research (Adhikari and Agrawal, 2013; Mahanty et al., 2013; Mayrand and Paquin, 2005; Tacconi et al., 2013) Total payments in individual case studies have ranged on the order of a few dollars per household per year to as much as thousands of dollars, often dependent on land size (FONAFIFO et al., 2012; Mahanty et al., 2013) There are also many cases of PES being paid to communities rather than households, but there is no clear evidence that one method is better than another (Reynolds, 2012; Tacconi et al., 2013) There are also PES projects that not make use of cash payments for participation, but rather provide other types of compensation and rewards (van Noordwijk and Leimona, 2010) Examples include the Socio Bosque program in Ecuador, which requires participants to provide investment plans for PES funds, including in local health and community initiatives (de Koning et al., 2011), or other projects that invest in local infrastructure and irrigation for participating communities (Tacconi et al., 2013) Agroforestry inputs, tree seedlings, and technical extension are other common incentives in non-cash PES plans, and such support for often non-capitalist subsistence production is another departure from orthodox neoliberal policy Greiner and Stanley (2013) have pointed out that additional co-benefits are an important part of PES, such as the development of social capital and psychological benefits from participation (Asquith et al., 2008; Garbach et al., 2012; Nkhata and Mosimane, 2012; van Noordwijk and Leimona, 2010) There is increasing recognition that only paying attention to pricing mechanisms for ecosystem services in the absence of cultural and social factors is inadequate, and co- P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 benefits, as opposed to only cash payments, may be one way to shape PES towards local norms (Muradian et al., 2013; Van Hecken and Bastiaensen, 2010; Vatn, 2010) Once payments are made, what participating suppliers in PES projects actually do, or spend their payments on? PES projects can be broadly characterized as falling under either “use-restricting” or “asset-enhancing” approaches (Wunder, 2007): “use-restricting” PES would pay participants to not something, such as convert forests to agriculture, or hunt wildlife (Milne and Adams, 2012), while “asset-enhancing” would instead focus on active management, such as in reforestation or clearing of invasive species (van Noordwijk et al., 2012; Wunder, 2005) Asset-enhancing PES projects appear to have made more positive impacts than userestricting approaches, as policing negative behaviour is more difficult to implement and imposes costs on households (Pirard et al., 2010) A commonly reported outcome has been that PES has not made much of a difference in land use, while in some places land use change has happened but has been modest (Alix-Garcia et al., 2012; Arriagada et al., 2012; Hayes, 2012; Robalino and Pfaff, 2013; Scullion et al., 2011) In a review of 26 PES cases, Adhikari and Agrawal (2013) assert that environmental outcomes have generally outweighed the social outcomes In other cases, PES may simply fail to induce paid-for conservation actions; many PES projects report problems with conditionality (e.g payments only being made for actual conservation actions) in that providers of services are not strictly monitored to make sure they are providing the paid-for action, and there is little repercussion if negative actions, such as deforestation, occur (Brouwer et al., 2011; Daniels et al., 2010; Minang and van Noordwijk, 2012; Pattanayak et al., 2010; Porras et al., 2013a; van Noordwijk et al., 2012) Many times people may not even know they are participating in PES (Neitzel et al., 2014) In other cases, PES payments have simply not been as lucrative as more destructive uses like logging or cash crop agriculture (Gene, 2007; Hayes, 2012; Pirard, 2012b; Sierra and Russman, 2006) 2.2 Outcomes of PES: inequality, privatization and accumulation, or not? Regardless of whether or not we consider PES as truly ‘neoliberal’ or not, to what degree have PES schemes been able to avoid the negative outcomes associated with neoliberalism, such as increasing inequality and accumulation of land by the wealthier through alienation and privatization? The literature on outcomes of PES in developing countries is mixed, which accounts for the fact that early enthusiasm for PES as a winewin for conservation and development has given way to more realistic expectations Recent work shows PES are expensive to set up (Uchida et al., 2005) and have high transaction costs (Alston et al., 2013); conflicts over the societal value of ecosystem services are often hard to resolve (Clements et al., 2010; Kari and Korhonen-Kurki, 2013); and PES projects simply may fail to reach people responsible for degradation of environmental services (Brouwer et al., 2011; Minang and van Noordwijk, 2012) Many questions also remain about how effective and efficient PES can be in achieving poverty alleviation as compared to other long-tested approaches, like conditional cash transfers (Grieg-Gran et al., 2005; Milder et al., 2010; Rodríguez et al., 2011; Rosa et al., 2004; Tschakert, 2007; Wunder, 2008) These and other issues have raised questions about whether PES is being promoted too heavily as a solution to what are very disparate conservation problems (Muradian et al., 2013) A recent review noted that despite a voluminous literature, no analysis has yet conclusively answered, “Does PES work better than no PES intervention in delivering environmental services?” (Pattanayak et al., 2010) On the question of income accumulation and inequality that may result from market-based conservation policy, there is not yet 427 a systematic understanding of the factors that influence active participation in PES, including eligibility, desire, and ability, which might help explain uneven participation outcomes (Arriagada et al., 2009; Gong et al., 2010; Melo et al., 2014; Pagiola et al., 2005) Many case studies have primarily looked at whether individual PES payments covered opportunity costs for participants (such as in foregone agricultural production) and have not directly addressed inequality issues per se (Bulte et al., 2008; de Koning et al., 2011; Gauvin et al., 2009; Gross-Camp et al., 2012; Mahanty et al., 2013; Pagiola et al., 2010a, 2008) Increases in household income without income stratification are reported in some comparative studies where households have received payments (Tacconi et al., 2013), while in other cases, benefits have been mixed A number of PES projects have reported low participation rates and consequently unequal benefit distribution (Adhikari, 2009; Clements et al., 2013; Schomers and Matzdorf, 2013) In some reported PES schemes, long contract times, especially for services like carbon, were not clearly understood by participants and might cause future problems with issues like land inheritance (Tacconi et al., 2013) There have been few studies that have tried to compare the relative lessons and successes at the household level from different types and forms of PES payments (Mayrand and Paquin, 2005) In some reported cases, cash income may increase due to payments, but agricultural production may decline when required land changes are made, leading to no net benefit or even losses; for example, Yang et al (2013) report that households in China's Sloping Land Conversion Program faced forest restrictions and crop losses to wildlife that were not compensated for sufficiently by the overall size of payments In tree planting projects for carbon, some studies report positive household incomes (for example, converting agricultural lands to forest freed household labourers for other activities, including migrant wage labour (W Xu et al., 2007)), although other studies report that PES benefits were often captured by better off households, larger landowners, or well-connected industries €rner et al., 2010; Corbera and Brown, 2010; Lansing, 2013; (Bo Zbinden and Lee, 2005) In some PES studies, net negative results, such as restrictions on forest use (e.g no fuelwood collection) and declining household food security and income, have been documented (Beymer-Farris and Bassett, 2012; Ibarra et al., 2011; Liang and Mol, 2013; Osborne, 2011), as well as community conflict between PES receivers and non-receivers (Rodríguez de Francisco et al., 2013; Tacconi et al., 2013) In these cases, conservation restrictions that have been required to receive PES payments have resulted in clear trade-offs that have fallen hardest on the poor and women (Boyd, 2002; Kerr, 2002) The evidence that PES has resulted in increased restrictions on access to previously public resources, or that there has been an expansion of privatizing tendencies among resources now valued by PES, is also mixed In one analysis of Mexico's PES programs, Osborne (2013) notes that mapping and privatization of once-common ejidos was observed, but how much of this privatization was attributable to PES projects alone and how much to overall trends towards ejido privatization is not clear A final question concerns how local participants have been able to avoid negative outcomes of inequality and accumulation through their active shaping of PES implementation; in other words, how originally neoliberal goals may have been shaped by local actors to fit with local objectives and concerns (Higgins et al., 2012) The evidence on this from developing countries is incomplete, but some case studies show that active involvement, particularly from peasant and indigenous communities and organizations, have succeeded in shaping PES programs toward social objectives Studies of how participants in PES have been able to shape these programs to better reflect their needs, such as through agrarian organizing, is an important area of growing research (Shapiro-Garza, 2013b) The importance of intermediaries in facilitating access to PES schemes 428 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 has been noted (Bosselmann and Lund, 2013; T T T Pham et al., 2010) and these organizations may also play important roles in enabling communities to retain voice and input into policy implementation Key areas where beneficiaries have been able to shape PES implementation include: the spatial scope of such projects (e.g lobbying for expanded coverage of PES programs (Shapiro-Garza, 2013a) or forest carbon project participation (Reynolds, 2012)); in the size and timing of payments (Narloch et al., 2011; Pirard, 2012b); in the types of payments that are acceptable, including shifting some PES schemes away from cash payments to more socially acceptable ideas of compensation, rewards and incentives (Gross-Camp et al., 2012; Swallow et al., 2007); and in using PES participation to leverage other social goods, such as more secure land tenure (Osborne, 2011) Refocusing policy-scale objectives to include more development-oriented goals and reduced emphasis on environmental outcomes has also been seen in some national level programs, such as in Mexico, where Shapiro-Garza notes that the PES program “has been hybridized through multiple sites of articulation and contestation to become a federal subsidy for rural poverty alleviation” (Shapiro-Garza, 2013a, p 5) Such outcomes are not surprising, given that many authors have noted the widely variable results of other neoliberal policies (Brenner et al., 2010; Mansfield, 2004; Peck and Tickell, 2002) Given these international experiences that indicate there is a continuum of what we might term “degrees of neoliberalism and marketization” in PES plans, and that these projects vary in their ability to adequately involve households and improve environmental management, and further that there are indications of important roles for local actors in helping shape PES policy at both local and even national levels, we set out to explore these issues through a case study in Vietnam Vietnam is a recent entrant into the PES implementation debate, and provides a useful setting to explore major issues surrounding how neoliberal (or not) PES schemes are; how households engage with them; and how these local actors might successfully shape the overall contours of PES policy based on local values of equity and justice, rather than the market-led value of efficiency Vietnam was selected as a case study because of the relatively recent implementation of a nation-wide PES policy, which has allowed us to research the roll-out from the very beginning of the process, and because PES laws in Vietnam explicitly acknowledge the importance of poverty reduction for households as an important goal of these schemes This has allowed us to analyse if goals for household involvement and benefits are effectively addressed by the country's approach to PES PES in Vietnam as a case study PES has rapidly gained popularity as an environmental governance strategy in Vietnam in the past decade First introduced by several small donor-supported campaigns in the mid-2000s (Leimona et al., 2008; Minh et al., 2008; Peters, 2008), these projects introduced the idea that upland forest communities could be paid to protect watersheds for downstream water users In 2007, the national Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) led a process to design and formulate an official PES policy for Vietnam, including a detailed review of international PES experiences (for example, a visit to Vietnam by officials from Costa Rica's well-known program was sponsored as part of this process) The Prime Minister approved Decision No 380 QD-TTG in 2008, titled “On The Pilot Policy On Forest Environment Service Charge Payment,” and PES was also included as part of a Biodiversity Law that passed in 2008 These decisions set up two PES pilot projects, in Lam Dong and Son La provinces in the south and north of the country respectively, on a two-year basis, to be replicated elsewhere in the future if successful In Lam Dong province, the pilot primarily linked hydropower plants and water users in other provinces, such as urban areas of southern Vietnam, to households living in an upland watershed, while the Son La pilot linked hydropower companies of the northern mountains to communities and households in that watershed As in other countries, PES was proposed as a winewin solution for a myriad of conservation challenges, including deforestation, the need for increased participation of local people in forest protection, concerns over headwater and downstream water supplies, and biodiversity generally (McElwee, 2012) (see Fig 1) The two state-sponsored pilots were considered to be successes in their brief trial run, and in 2010, a new national policy was passed, titled Decision 99 ND-CP, “On the Policy for Payment for Forest Environmental Services.” Decision 99 says that “Organizations and individuals benefiting from forest environmental services must pay for forest environmental services” and indicates that five types of forest PES payments are legal: 1) payments for land protection, such as soil erosion; 2) payments for watershed protection and water regulation; 3) carbon sequestration payments; 4) landscape and biodiversity protection payments for tourism purposes; and 5) payments to protect the spawning grounds and source of seed for aquaculture (MARD, 2010) The decree indicates that some PES fees will be mandatory, and that required buyers will include hydropower companies, water companies, industrial facilities that use water, tourist companies, and others to be determined Both direct user to seller contracts and indirect ones between sellers and intermediaries are allowed; in indirect cases, payments will go to a Forest Protection and Development Fund to be set up in each province and payments will be transmitted via these provincial funds to recipients The expressed hope for Decree 99 is that it will enable the funding of forest conservation activities without the need for central government transfers; an official in charge of forest administration noted in a meeting in late 2011 that MARD hopes to only supply around 25% of the budget for forest management to lower level state entities (national parks, forest reserves, logging companies) in the future, and the remaining 75% of budgets will have to be raised by these local organs through creative means like PES, entrance fees, or other approaches (personal communication, Nguyen Ba Ngai, 2011) A number of donor-funded smaller-scale PES and PES-type projects (at least 13 in 2014) also are currently operating in individual provinces, usually involving donor financial transfers rather than true user-funded PES (T T T Pham et al., 2010, 2009) The sponsors of these projects include conservation organizations like the World Wildlife Fund, poverty alleviation organizations like Care International, and bilateral and multilateral donors such as JICA, GTZ and the Asian Development Bank (T T Pham et al., 2013) 3.1 Methods Since 2011, the authors have been carrying out research in several of the provinces that have PES or PES-like programs, including the two initial pilot provinces of Lam Dong and Son La From 2011 to 2014, we have regularly visited the two initial PES pilot sites and carried out a mixed methods approach to collecting social and environmental data In this article we discuss our work in Lam Dong and Son La, where we chose two districts in which PES has been carried out, selected villages that have been involved, and interviewed a total of 151 households (representing some 600 ỵ individuals) in these selected villages in fall 2011, with follow-up qualitative interviews in 2013 and 2014 (see Table 2).2 Households were selected at random from a village census; households are usually the main units making land-use and livelihood decisions, and this project has used the standard Vietnamese government definition of households P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 429 Fig Billboard advertising PES projects in Lam Dong, Vietnam The standardized survey assessed local livelihoods, such as household membership, labour allocation, ethnicity, migration, patterns of income and expenditures, agricultural characteristics, type and scale of land holdings and tenure regimes, and role that natural resource use plays in the household We also assessed levels of participation in PES and how PES income was used within the household We carried out focus groups with smaller numbers of local residents in each village, including forest users, women, and poor households We conducted interviews with government officials and policymakers in each field site to gather information on the development of general forest policies as well as local PES implementation; interviewed stakeholders included Provincial, District and Commune Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Offices; Provincial, District and Commune Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment Offices; Provincial and District Forest Protection Departments; Provincial Funds for the collection of PES money; Forest Protection Management Boards; management staff of two protected areas (Bi Duop in Lam Dong and Copia in Son La); officials of companies paying environmental service fees, such as hydropower companies, water supply companies and tourism Table Comparison of two pilot PES provinces in Vietnam Indicator Lam Dong province (south) Son La province (north) Dominant forest type Pine forest, deciduous broadleaved forest % Forest Cover (Natural) % Forest Cover (Plantation) Deforestation/ afforestation rates, 2000-2005 Ethnic composition 54% Mixed coniferous-broadleaved forest on limestone, with significant bamboo 35% 4% 2% À4.8% þ3.3% 22% ethnic minority (Koho, Chil, Mnong) 32% ~8000 83% ethnic minority (Thai, Hmong, Tay, Dao) 53% ~52,000 Poverty rates Total HH receiving PES payments in 2011 Land tenure situation 3% of forest estate held ~80% of forest estate held by HH & communities by HH, user groups & communities Source: Provincial statistics and interviews, 2011e2012 companies; and NGOs and civil society organizations involved in PES In total more than 50 stakeholder interviews were carried out Research sites (Fig 2): Lam Dong is a mountainous province located in the southeast of the Central Highlands region, approximately 300 km from the major urban area of Ho Chi Minh City, with a total provincial population of 1,198,261 Situated around 800e1000 m asl, Lam Dong's economy is primarily from agriculture, forestry and fishing (49%), services (32%) and industry (20%) The province has 255,400 usable for agriculture, and about half the province is composed of sloping land above 25 High economic value crops such as coffee, tea and mulberry predominate, and around Da Lat city (the provincial capital), vegetable and flower plantations grown in greenhouses have spread rapidly Forest cover is reported at around 54%, with more than 345,003 of production forest for timber (57% of the total), protection forests for watersheds (172,800 ha, 29% of forest area), and special-use forests for biodiversity and tourism (83,674 ha, 14% of forest area) Most all of these forests are under some form of state management, such as in national parks and nature reserves, forest watershed protection boards, and state logging companies Household ownership of forests is very low in Lam Dong, around 3% of the forest estate; instead, households can participate in “forest contracting” as a model of comanagement, whereby state forest owners contract on a yearly basis with individual households to provide protection services in return for a set payment These contracts were begun in the late 1990s, and in 2004, 301,836 of forest were under these types of contracts for protection (Nguyen, 2011) These protection contracts have since transitioned to being PES contracts since 2009 Despite these policies for protection, natural forests in Lam Dong continued to decline by around 5% from 2000 to 2008, and according to officials in the province, the main drivers of deforestation have been over-logging activities by state-owned companies; the expansion of cash crops like coffee, rubber and cashew; free migration by people from other provinces to claim land illegally; forest fires, either accidental or arson; and illegal logging (Nguyen, 2011) Son La is also a mountainous province, located in the Northwest Mountainous region, 320 km distant from the capital city of Hanoi, with a population of 1,083,700 The terrain of the province is very complex, heavily dissected by valleys and with steep slopes, limiting arable land, with an average height of 600e700 m asl Wet rice is grown in valleys with coffee, tea and fruit crops planted on nearby slopes, with some cattle raising as well The province has a total of 588,763 of forested land (around 35% of the land area), including 184,118 of production forest (31% of forests), 430 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 Fig Regions and provinces in Vietnam where field work on PES was conducted 356,996 of watershed protection forest (61% of forest area), and 47,649 of special-use forests (8% of forest area) Over 97% of Son La's natural area belongs to the watershed of the Da and Ma Rivers, and protection forests play an extremely important role in the prevention of erosion, landslides and flash floods, and contributes to the regulation of the water levels of two very large downstream hydropower plants, the Son La and Hoa Binh dams Deforestation has slowed in this province, primarily due to limited high quality forest areas (thereby reducing the number of problems of illegal logging), and forest cover actually expanded since 2000 due to active afforestation projects Most instances of continued deforestation are a result of agricultural expansion (such as coffee) or loss of forests due to hydropower reservoir development 3.2 Implementation of the PES pilot projects The two PES pilot provinces now have several years of data on implementation; users have already been assessed payment fees, and service providing households have been paid several times Both pilots had to undertake a series of measures in order to get off the ground, including: identifying the ecosystem services; identifying the service payees; identifying the value of the services and payment rates; and identifying who the paid service providers would be In both sites, provincial officials decided to focus on hydrological services and soil protection, although some attention was also paid to amenity values of forests Other environmental services, like biodiversity, were judged to be too difficult to compensate directly and therefore were simply to be implied cobenefits from preservation of forest cover Local ecosystem services were assessed by hired consultants from a USAID-funded project in Lam Dong; one study used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model developed in the US to estimate the approximate costs of soil erosion and water runoff in deforested lands upstream from a hydroelectric plant, while an economist conducted a willingness to pay study among water users in urban areas of Ho Chi Minh City (ARBCP, 2009; V A Pham, 2009) From these two reports, a fee structure for both areas was suggested and adopted by MARD officials: buyers were to be assessed 20 VND/ kWh (US$0.0013/kWh) generated from hydroelectric plants and 40VND/m3 (US$0.0025/m3) from water consumed in participating urban areas (These uniform rates were later adopted for all of the country in Decree 99) Tourism companies depending on some sort of environmental service were also to be assessed 1e2% of their total related revenues Buyers of environmental services were identified in both sites In the Lam Dong pilot area, the downstream Water Supply Company of Ho Chi Minh City (SAWACO) and the water supply company of Bien Hoa City; two hydropower plants (Da Nhim, capacity of 160 MW, and Dai Ninh, capacity of 300 MW); and five state-owned tourism companies using forest environmental services to generate revenue (e.g trekking companies, waterfall tours) were identified as dependent on ecosystem services for their economic operations In Son La province, the payees included the massive Hoa Binh hydroelectric system (capacity 1900 MW) that supplies electricity to much of northern Vietnam, as well as a much smaller hydropower system (Suoi Sap, capacity 14 MW) and several water supply companies All of these entities were required to pay into a new Provincial Forest Protection Fund managed by local agricultural departments During the pilot period, fees collected totalled nearly $5 million US in Lam Dong and nearly $3 million US in Son La (see Table 3) The large majority of the fees have come from the hydropower plants, with urban water user fees a much smaller contribution Tourism revenue has been practically negligible, with only a few dollars assessed to a few companies based on 1% of ticket prices, usually around $1 per visit to lakes or forested areas around Da Lat city in Lam Dong province Most companies that have paid PES fees have stated that they will be passing their additional costs onto their customers by raising the price of electricity or water However, one issue that has arisen in the Son La pilot is that several mandated users did not pay fees for several years, using several excuses, including that the fees were too high, the national electricity company had not been given permission to pass costs onto consumers yet, and that hydropower companies that report financial losses should not have to pay PES fees (Hess and T T H To, 2011) 3.3 Participation in the pilots In both sites, the majority of local “service suppliers” are ethnic minorities, including Koho, Chil and Mnong communities in Lam Dong, and Thai, Dao and Hmong communities in Son La, although each pilot has a rather different implementation structure due to differences in land tenure arrangements in the two sites In Lam P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 431 Table Fees collected in two pilot PES project provinces, 2009e2010 Payer Total payment Rates based on % Of total fund for province Lam Dong, (Southern Vietnam): 516,800 of forest under PES Dai Ninh and Da Nhim Hydropower plants 4.6 million US (96 billion VND) 20 VND/kWh produced (US$0.0013/kWh) 89% Water supply companies of Ho Chi Minh and Bien 519,000 US (10.9 billion VND) 40 VND/m3 supplied (US$0.0025/m3) 10% Hoa cities Tourism companies 28 US (0.6 million VND) 1% of profits Less than 1% Total 4.6 million USD (98.6 billion VND) paid to 13 state forest owners which transferred around 80% to ~8000 households on yearly contracts Son La (Northern Vietnam): 397,000 of forest under PES Hoa Binh and Suoi Sap Hydroelectric companies 2.9 million US (62 billion VND) 20 VND/kWh produced(US$0.0013/kWh) 99% Water supply company of Son La city 1600 US (34 million VND) 40 VND/m3 (US$0.0025/m3) 1% Total 2.9 million USD (62.3 billion VND) transferred to 52,000 forest owners (HH and communities) Source: Provincial interviews, 2011 USD ¼ 21,000 Vietnam Dong (VND) at time of research Dong province, most forests remain under state control and so this province selected local households who sign protection contracts with forest owners (the state) Individual households agree to participate by patrolling state forest land and signing agreements that they will not engage in deforestation, while state organizations get to keep some money for administrative costs of administering PES For example, of the 2010 fees collected in Lam Dong province ($2.61 million US), 10% were kept by the provincial PES fund to cover their expenses, 9% of the PES fees went to 13 large state forest owners (such as the Bi Duop National Park) for management purposes to cover their costs, and the remaining 81% went to households who agreed to protect forests on yearly contracts A total of approximately 8000 households have participated in these contracts since the beginning of the pilot in Lam Dong State forest agencies and forest owners targeted individual households and communities for participation based on broad provincial criteria of prioritizing poorer households and ethnic minorities For example, the Bi Duop National Park selected communities on the southern boundary of its border to participate, and then let local community leaders designate which households should be selected for PES contracts, based on labour availability, income status, and enthusiasm for participation Land tenure was not an issue in selection for participation, since all the land under PES contracts still belongs to Bi Duop National Park In Son La, most forests were allocated/privatized to households and communities in the 1990s, and only small areas of forest remain under direct state control Therefore, in this province forest-owning households contract directly to the PES provincial fund, which has increased transaction costs considerably 52,000 forest owners have been paid from PES funds in Son La, of which 45,000 were individual households, 6000 were communities or groups of households, and 1000 were other organizations (for example, the army), and 3500 officials in Son La are required to distribute all the PES payments to these recipients (Loft et al., 2014) Participation largely has depended on awareness of the PES program among these land-owning communities; the ability of provincial and district officials to enrol people in these pilots; and in some cases where community leaders decided to enrol community forests, some households reported that they had had no choice whether to participate or not In our household survey, we asked respondents to list why they were involved in PES projects (if they were doing so) Households were free to choose from a list of multiple reasons, and two were most often listed: to receive payments and to receive benefits from better forest management (Table 4) Not all households in eligible PES areas have participated in the program, however In Lam Dong, because selection of eligible households was made by the state forest owner or local community leaders, many of the PES contracts went only to those households that had previously participated in other forest planting and protection programs with local authorities, dating back to the early 1990s, leaving out those who were not already connected Slightly less than a quarter of our sample had reported not taking part in protection projects (see Table 5), and discussions with authorities confirmed that in some communities, between 10 and 30% of people were not taking part in PES When asked what the reasons were for not having participated, most common reason given was that the household had not been asked to participate by local authorities or by community members, either due to a lack of a PES project nearby, or else the PES roster was already “full” In no case did a household respond that they were worried about restrictions on forest use as a reason not to get involved in a forest protection project (Table 5) During focus groups, we were able to elaborate further on these findings Some of those who were not participating in the PES project in Lam Dong included older households who had insufficient labour to regularly patrol forests; female headed households that had no male labourers, since forest protection was seen as a male job; and households that were away from the area at certain times of the year while doing migrant labour, as they were considered unable to devote sufficient time for forest protection In Son La, poorer households with insufficient funds to reforest land and young households who did not own forest land were most often excluded from PES projects 3.4 Contestation and alteration of the PES pilots Despite the national policy that required a fixed level of assessed PES fees for service buyers (namely 20 VND/kWh generated from hydroelectric plants and 40VND/m3 from water companies), a national attempt to set similarly fixed levels of PES payments to service providers was strongly protested by households in both sites, which succeeded in changing this policy Decree 99 suggests a tiered system of PES payments which would be dependent on forest type and protection status; for example, one hectare of forest Table Reasons for participating in PES projects Reason Lam Dong (n ¼ 39) Son La (n ¼ 29) To manage forests better for long term benefits To get payments Feeling personal responsibility Participating to get new information and experience Gain access to land rights To improve social relations Forced to participate 44% 62% 72% 33% 15% 14% 21% 72% 2% 2% 0% 0% 0% 24% Source: HH survey, 2011 Only households participating in PES answered this question in the survey 432 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 Table Reasons given for not having participated in PES Not being invited or selected to take part No local forest patrol groups in this area Want to participate but need more info No financial conditions to participate Do not think protection will have any results Don't see any direct household benefits from participation No labour to participate Worried about forest restrictions Table Average size of Forest Protection Payment Received per Household (HH) Lam Dong (n ¼ 74) Son La (n ¼ 76) 23 1 0 4 1 0 Average amount of PES payment per HH Minimum payment per HH Maximum payment per HH in VND Average area of protected forest under PES contracts per HH Minimum area under PES per HH Maximum area under PES per HH Lam Dong Son La 8,919,307 VND (US$425) 39,200,000 37.2 120,092 VND (US$7) 2,700,000 14.5 ha 74 0.10 43 (Source: Field survey, 2011) (Source: Field survey, 2011) in any given province would be compensated based on the total amount of payments collected for the area (minus management fees), divided by the total area protected, and multiplied by a special coefficient (called “Coefficient K”) that would reflect forest quality and protection status (MARD, 2010) This use of “Coefficient K” was an attempt to set some levels of conditionality on the PES payments by linking them to broad categories of ecological type of forest (called coefficient K1), function of forest (for production, protection or special use) (K2), origin of forest (planted or natural) (K3), and type of forest protection provided (K4) (ranging from difficult to easy) (T T Pham et al., 2013) However, using multiple K coefficients led to complicated calculations for local officials, as well as disparities in total payments for different households For Son La province, in the first year of the pilot, lands classified as “natural” protection forest were assigned a coefficient (k ¼ 1), which meant that around US$7 per per year would be paid, while plantation forest under protection would be (k ¼ 0.9), equivalent to US$6.3 per per year, natural production forest would be (k ¼ 0.6) with payment around US$4.2 per per year, and plantation forest under active production would be assigned (k ¼ 0.5), or US$3 per per year In Lam Dong, similar coefficients were considered in an attempt to reward higher amounts based on quality of forest cover and degree of management However, as indicated in interviews and focus groups, local households protested when they received these different payments in the first year, as they did not understand why they might have gotten less money than a neighbour for having invested the same amount of time and labour in protection Households that were interviewed emphasized that their work in PES, particularly in Lam Dong, was based on labour: they primarily went out to their contracted forest areas on set time schedules, walking around forest edges once every week, and they often described their actions not in terms of “protection” but in terms of “effort” Just as jobs of similar “effort” were paid similar wages in the open labour market, households in PES projects wanted equal payments for similar labour The unequal payments in the first year of the program resulted in resentment and even vandalism toward those who were benefiting (To et al., 2012) The protests resulted in authorities scrapping the tiered approach Subsequently, in Lam Dong, payment rates were calculated in a simple fashion based on dividing the total PES funds received each year by the number of participating households In 2010, this amounted to around 280,000 VND (US$13)/ha in payment, and in 2011 it was 400,000 VND/ha (US$19/ha) In Son La, the forest department decided in phase that only one K-coefficient was to be used, with a uniform payment of around US$ 6.8 per ha/ yr, which has been consistent across recent years These uniform payments now mean that every PES provider will get the exact same level of payment for participating, regardless of amount of carbon conserved or water regulated by different types of forests and management strategies However, households still get different total amounts of payments because the contracts are based on total hectares protected Participating households in Lam Dong are contracted to protect over 30 per household on average (although these households not have land tenure rights to this land), while Son La households are generally land owners with secure tenure but very small holdings (under ha/household on average, or in community forests, small areas of less than 20 total) In both areas, communities or small groups of households participated together in patrolling and other forest protecting activities; in Lam Dong, most cases PES payments have been directed at individual households while in Son La both individual households and whole communities received payments (55% of survey respondents participated as individual households, while the rest reported having participated as part of a group) Table shows the size of the payments varies significantly between the study sites.3 The average participating household in Lam Dong had received 8,919,307 VND (US$425)/yr while in Son La it was only 120,092 VND (US$ 7)/yr Payments in Lam Dong were significantly larger than the other site for two reasons One, the provincial level of payment was much higher (400,000 VND/ha) and two, households were often contracted to protect larger amounts of forest In Son La, payments were much smaller (no more than 100,000 VND/ha) and were made for protection of 15 or less Son La also provided more community-based PES payments, which were often spent on community infrastructure like supplies for classrooms, leading to lower payments to households In addition to influencing the base rate of payments, households also were able to influence when and how the payments were made, although this had been achieved in only in one of the two sites Households and communities had stressed during the pilot phase that PES payments needed to be both regular and dependable, which were considered even more important that the total amount of payments As one man said in a Lam Dong focus group, “It's really important that payments be on time You need to depend on them You need them for school fees or to buy fertilizer at certain times If the payment doesn't come when you expect it, it's a big problem” In Lam Dong, households had requested that PES payments come every months on set dates, noting that quarterly payments were more convenient as they often came at times of the year when cash was desperately needed, such as in fall at the start of the school year and in January before the start of the Lunar New Year Households interviewed in focus groups stated that the most important factor in the timing of payment was that they were regular, and not late In several villages in which we interviewed households, the forest owners (such as the national park management board) had been late with distributing payments, and this had The majority of households (94 HH) in our survey sample had received some sort of forest protection payments (PES or other smaller types of funds, like for reforestation) from different sources (both Vietnam government or donor projects) P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 Table Changes in forest practices made after receiving PES payments No changes in personal forest practices Stopped land conversion Stopped logging Stopped fuelwood collecting Replanting/regeneration Preventing others from using forest Preventing forest fires by others Other Lam Dong Son La 23% 0% 15% 2% 3% 66% 73% 18% 31% 3% 21% 31% 10% 41% 62% 7% (Source: Field survey, 2011) caused trouble for some households that had needed the money to pay off the debts at a certain time In Son La the most common payment was only once a year, which households said was not that important, because the total amount of the payment was so low in most cases that it did not make sense to distribute it in multiple tranches: “It's barely enough to buy snacks and ramen”, complained one older woman in a Son La focus group 3.5 Outcomes of the pilots Government officials have declared the PES pilots to be a success on both environmental and social fronts; Lam Dong officials have claimed that PES is responsible for a 15% reduction in poverty and a 50% reduction in environment violations, though it is not clear how these figures were derived (Winrock, 2011) Monitoring has been fairly lax, as so far no spatial data have been used to assess changes in land use in either pilot since they began State forest owners have been responsible for monitoring in Lam Dong; for example, a ranger station of a state watershed forest in Don Duong district organized weekly monitoring schedules for the PES user groups, rather than letting them self-organize, and these reports were passed upwards The provincial forest department in Son La is supposed to conduct PES monitoring but does so infrequently The lax monitoring appears to have serious consequences From our survey work, it is not entirely clear the extent to which new forest payments will serve to alter forest management for participating households and communities Fully 25% of households in our survey reported having done nothing differently in terms of land use after having received PES funds (Table 7) For the other households that reported active land use management, most indicated that they primarily monitored forests on a weekly, biweekly or even monthly basis for forest fires, but did little else to protect forests under their PES contracts In Lam Dong, the majority of changes involved preventing forest fires and keeping outsiders out of forests In Son La, the majority of households stated that they had not done anything different, while some prevented forests fires or outsiders or restricted fuelwood collection The very low size of payments in Son La was likely a contributing factor to the less active changes in forest protection activities Perhaps because the project had required little in the way of costs, participants had generally positive things to say about their participation in forest protection projects Of the participants in PES projects, 76% reported positive benefits: 60% of households reported general environmental benefits, like water and flood prevention, while 40% reported the main benefit was the cash payments Other reasons given in focus groups for being approving of PES included better access to other non-timber products, increased access to timber, receiving access and tenure rights to land, increased voice and participation, and more friendly neighbour relations The remaining 24% of households in the survey reported having negative experiences with PES forest protection projects Of these households, most felt the labour requirements for 433 protection were too onerous, while several thought PES caused conflicts between neighbours and communities Yet despite the generally positive perceptions of PES, a number of households reported dissatisfaction with payment amounts; 67% of those who had gotten a payment felt it was too small for the amount of time they put into forest protection Suggested amounts for payments ranged from 50,000 VND/ha in areas of Son La that were not receiving any payments, to several households who suggested million a year/ha The average suggested amount was 781,750 VND/ ha, which is almost double the current amount of payment in Lam Dong (400,000VND) and significantly higher than Son La's payments of 100,000 ha/yr Other suggested co-benefits in addition to cash payments included land tenure certificates for permanent land rights; several households who suggested community infrastructure investment; and some who suggested in-kind payments of rice Discussion: variegation in PES in Vietnam and globally As noted in the previous section, PES schemes have tended to have wide variation in implementation and outcomes, and this variegation calls into question whether or not PES should be considered broadly neoliberal The Vietnam case study confirms this point, and also highlights the challenges in meeting in particular the goals of efficiency and conditionality, two hallmarks of the market approach, as we discuss below 4.1 Local influences on PES: distributional and procedural equity The Vietnam case points out that local influences on PES often revolve around perceptions of equity, which has been a topic of considerable interest in the broader PES literature (Corbera et al., 2007b; Mahanty et al., 2013; Martin et al., 2014; van Noordwijk and Leimona, 2010) For example, McDermott et al (2013) identify distributive, procedural and contextual equity as important concepts, indicating that participants will judge PES on how well benefits are shared (distributive equity), how participatory the development of PES was (procedural equity), and the power relations and capabilities between actors (contextual equity) As Muradian et al (2010) point out, “a PES scheme that leads to an unfair distribution of benefits and costs among stakeholders has a lesser chance to be acceptable and legitimized by some of the concerned agents … Since different fairness criteria are championed by different stakeholders in any given PES scheme, the political economy of which criterion prevails is something that ought to be looked upon with due care in any PES design” (p 1204) In Vietnam, the households in the two pilot sites clearly shared ideas of distributional equity in that they successfully protested the application of K coefficients, which had resulted in uneven payment rates for different types of land The local sentiment was that equal effort should receive equal payment; other studies in Vietnam have noted similarly strong feelings toward equal benefit sharing (Petheram and Campbell, 2010) These preferences for egalitarian payments have also been noted in many other PES sites outside of Vietnam as well, where “perceptions of unfairness can undermine the effectiveness even of incentives that provide apparent net benefits” (Sommerville et al., 2010a, p 1263) Yet preferences for equality were primarily confined to equality of payments among the participating households and communities; nonetheless, in both sites in Vietnam, there were households who were not selected to participate in PES projects (particularly those who were not already connected into forest protection programs) and this resulted in inequality in procedural justice and access For example, in one focus group in Bon Dung village in Lam Dong, non-participants noted that in their minds, “PES is not fair because not everyone can take part People are picked [to 434 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 participate] according to who they are related to or their relations with the village head,” as one respondent stated This mirrors concerns in other PES settings that equity might be achieved among participants, but not in comparison with non-participants (Clements et al., 2010; García-Amado et al., 2011) This problem highlights the fact that communities are not homogenous, and the divisions that characterize them will play out in resource control and access as well; this can lead to some leaders or more connected households making PES commitments which others not share (Milne and Adams, 2012) The outcomes of problems with distributional equity could be seen in Lam Dong in particular, where focus group respondents said that there were cases of non-participants clearing forests out of spite “because people are mad that they haven't received PES money If they see fires or deforestation they also don't want to report it to the authorities because they aren't taking part in PES”, as one middle-aged woman noted The exclusion of some households in both PES sites in Vietnam was largely a function of historical factors (past participation in forest protection projects or having previously received land from forest allocation) combined with concerns that PES participation would impose labour costs that some households could not bear These concerns remind us that historical configurations of access, participation and property influence the social relations that govern how PES will be locally effective (Corbera et al., 2007a, p 588; Pascual et al., 2010, p 1238) Procedural justice was also less well achieved in Vietnam, as local service providers were not involved in the policy making process, particularly in the development of Decision 380 and Decree 99 Further, participation in both sites was only nominally voluntary, with some households complaining that they had been coerced into being involved, especially in Son La where contracts to communities were more widely used In other sites in Vietnam where donors have tried to establish PES projects, there is often a lack of awareness of what PES is, even among forest officials (Simelton et al., 2013) Such problems with true participation in the development of PES from the start are common in the wider literature; for example, many forest carbon projects, even those that claim to place a high priority on procedural justice, not meet even basic requirements for participation (Suiseeya and Caplow, 2013) Corbera et al (2007b) for example note that over three-quarters of the households they interviewed in four PES project sites in Latin America had never been consulted in the process of implementation, let alone participated as full stakeholders Further, participation in procedural equity should not just involve sellers In Vietnam, there was no mechanism for either the sellers or buyers to reflect their feedback and comments to the PES pilots; in one interview, one buyer (a vice president at a hydropower company) had a number of suggestions on better ways to assess water pricing that would more accurately reflect the local situation, but he said he had no opportunity to offer this feedback While procedural justice often confers legitimacy on PES projects (Corbera et al., 2007a), the Vietnam case does show that it is possible to have improved social outcomes even with minimalistic participation For example, particularly in Lam Dong, both households and state forest institutions who were interviewed noted that PES had offered opportunities for the two sides to meet more often, resulting in better, less conflictual relations between villagers and officials of state lands, such as Bi Duop National Park Officials at the national park believed that there had been far fewer cases of illegal logging and arson after PES implementation, which they attributed to ‘better feelings’ between the two sides 4.2 Impacts on efficiency and conditionality Efficiency, additionality and conditionality have been primary goals of the market-oriented approach to PES from the start (Landell-Mills, 2002) Efficiency refers to the idea that conservation outputs should be maximized while costs of the conservation are minimized, thereby reaching a Pareto outcome, and markets are presumed to this more efficiently than regulations that apply to everyone (Engel et al., 2008) Additionality references the idea that PES payments should induce ‘additional’ conservation actions that would not have happened in the absence of the payment (Sierra and Russman, 2006) Conditionality refers to the idea that the ecosystem service needs to have actually been provided, otherwise the compensation/payment will not be provided (Engel et al., 2008) The potential trade-offs among efficiency and other social concerns like equity have long been a concern for PES (McAfee, 2012b; Pascual et al., 2010) In the Vietnam case, these efficiency goals were not being met by the PES project for a number of reasons First, for many households that were interviewed, there was little understanding about how the PES approach to forest management was any different from previous policies Only 34% of survey respondents reported that they had heard the term PES, while the rest had not or did not know Of those who had heard of PES, half thought it was a government program for forest protection Only a handful of respondents knew that it was a program that primarily received payments from environmental service users Most households thought that the PES payments that they had been receiving were direct government payments, and were not aware that they were payments that had been made by hydropower or water companies to the provincial government, which then disbursed these monies Because households received their payment via local government officials, they simply assumed the PES money was a state subsidy program, like many others they were familiar with (for example, the state provides free education and health care cards to any ethnic minority, and free salt and radios to people classified as poor) PES payments were often seen as yet another of these state charity-type programs, which made it difficult to understand the idea of conditionality (that is, the payments may stop if forest protection does not happen) As a result, many participants treated PES as a government entitlement fund and not a conditional environmental fund Further, because the enforcement and checking of PES contracts had been rather loose, most households felt that they were not restricted from continuing existing land use practices, including, for example, collecting fuelwood and other forest products, or clearing small fields for agriculture The lack of linkages between PES contracts and payments and requirements to change land use practices is seen in the fact that 25% of participating households accepted PES payments yet did nothing differently This shows a clear inefficiency in program design from an economic standpoint Yet when the pilots attempted to develop tiered pricing so that different service providers were compensated according to their actions, local level actors perceived this as unequal and unjust Equal benefit sharing, rooted in social and cultural norms, thus may challenge attempts to impose efficiency and conditionality, and too much focus on economic efficiency may aggravate local equity concerns 4.3 Is PES neoliberal in Vietnam? The PES projects in Vietnam share many similarities with other PES approaches in the global South The pilots have largely been state-led interventions, with a top-down involvement of state ministries and departments, rather than the market, such as in the specifications for the exact rates to be charged for water and electricity, as well as naming the buyers/payees who were mandated to participate (all of whom were state-owned or invested enterprises, like public utilities) Local governments have been clearly placed to act as middlemen in managing PES payments and P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 distribution between buyers and sellers, which has resulted in an expansion of state forest bureaucracies at provincial levels The two pilot provinces had actually hired new state employees to run and disburse the payment funds Even in other areas where donors were implementing smaller PES pilots, they also required involvement of the state and other intermediaries (T T T Pham et al., 2010) Although this result may be a result of Vietnam's long previously socialist history, there is little capitalist penetration into new sectors facilitated by PES; nearly all money in PES is being moved around from development aid agencies (which subsidize many PES projects) and individual consumers through state-owned companies to other state intermediaries and households, and there is almost no role for private capital in this system One representative of a state forest farm that was receiving PES credits interviewed in December 2011 noted that PES is primarily about “taking [money] from the right pocket of the government and putting it in the left pocket” Indeed, in descriptions of the PES projects from the Vietnam government, the words ‘market’ never occur; rather, PES are described as transactional payments, which implies regulatory approaches (GIZ/MARD, 2012) Commoditization has also been incomplete; with no private capital involved, it is difficult to see how commodities could be privatized In all cases, households did not see themselves as “selling” actual goods or commodities, but rather were being paid to provide a labour service (such as patrolling forests, reporting forest fires, or reducing fuelwood use) This seems to push back against fears that PES will always result in “commodity fetishism” (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010) While there is no doubt that some highly commoditised ecosystem services in commercial markets can exist (such as in international carbon markets) that may result in financialization and accumulation (Bumpus, 2011; Bumpus and Liverman, 2008; Corbera et al., 2007a; Corbera and Brown, 2010), but these are not inevitable outcomes Commodification can be a tricky process, particularly given problems with scale and valuation in PES (Bakker, 2005; Dempsey and Robertson, 2012; McAfee, 2012a) Finally, neoliberal directions not always result in homogenizing policies In Vietnam, we see that despite a single national PES policy, the two pilot sites were operating very differently In Lam Dong, the PES project served primarily as a labour compensation scheme, while in Son La the program was more targeted at investment in community forest protection This difference was largely the result of long-standing historical factors, as in the Lam Dong site, participating communities did not have firm land tenure, which limited some of their ability to control land use practices Further variation between the two sites could be seen in the radically different size of PES payments in each province, despite a common nation-wide price for PES user fees Conclusions: is PES neoliberal in general? In this paper we set out to explore major issues surrounding how neoliberal (or not) PES schemes are, and how involvement of local actors could be useful in influencing the overall contours of PES policy to avoid some of the predictions of negative consequences as a result of neoliberalisation In this analysis, we have reached several conclusions to contribute to the overall PES literature First, we assessed the question of if PES schemes can be accurately described as ‘neoliberal’ Arguments over PES being neoliberal (Matulis, 2013) versus only quasi-neoliberal (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012) versus not neoliberal at all show no signs of abating Assertions that neoliberalism focuses only on capitalist profit and gain (Büscher et al., 2012) not quite justice to the PES 435 payments seen in Vietnam and in other developing countries In other cases, PES policy has been used by various entrenched actors to continue state subsidies for certain sectors (like forestry) and does not represent any major neoliberal change (Lansing, 2013) This strong role of the state confirms previous literature noting that state involvement in neoliberal policies should be described more as a “roll-out” rather than a “roll-back” of state services per se (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Guthman, 2007) PES thus clearly fits the definition of a hybrid or third-way form of neoliberalisation that incorporates both market and state components (Corbera et al., 2009; McAfee and Shapiro-Garza, 2010; Muradian et al., 2013; ShapiroGarza, 2013a) This article has sided with scholars who have argued that PES programmes in most cases are not true markets because of this strong state role (Muradian et al., 2013; Vatn, 2010), and thus we should pay more attention to their particularities and outcomes rather than broadly characterizing them as ‘neoliberal’ The key takeaway is that there is strong variation in PES schemes and that we need better ways to conceptualise them other than neoliberal or not, or ‘genuine PES’ or not (Muradian et al., 2010; Pirard, 2012b) On each of the main outcomes associated with neoliberal environmental policy e namely commodification, privatization, and retreat of the state e we see a huge range of variation from different PES projects For example, on one side of a continuum of “role of the state” we have high involvement, ranging from China and Vietnam's experience of strong centralized command and control policy development involving the state as buyer, seller and manager (Kolinjivadi and Sunderland, 2012; Liang and Mol, 2013) On the other hand, there are some PES schemes which involve only minimal state interference, and primarily engage private actors who buy some well-defined environmental service (Arias et al., 2011; Blackman and Woodward, 2010) And in the middle of these two poles, many other PES may be more accurately described as a “hybrid model of governance, blending market principles with existing regulatory frameworks” (Higgins and Lockie, 2002; Wynne-Jones, 2013, p 78) Similarly, on the question of privatization and commodification, there are high capital PES projects, such as carbon reforestation that may require thousands of dollars per for afforestation, auditing and monitoring (Corbera and Brown, 2010), to very low capital requirements, as was seen in Vietnam, where monitoring of forests required only an investment of labour but no capital from households, and very little sense of commodities for sale Indeed, the failure to establish uniform market mechanisms in PES may be one of the most interesting and unexpected outcomes of these policies (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012) Consequently, the market-provided efficiency that was an original hallmark of PES is proving difficult to harness There are many examples of “low additionality, low commodification, indirect schemes that have been considered inefficient” (García-Amado et al., 2011, p 2366), such as examples in Clements et al (2010), Kosoy et al (2008) and Van Hecken et al (2013) and case studies in Muradian and Rival (2013) Yet because PES has been unable to establish true markets, should this not lessen the appeal of using only efficiency as a criterion of success? This would suggests a move away from Coasean approaches in PES and more careful looks at other approaches, such as social influences and creation of institutions for PES (Legrand et al., 2013; Tacconi, 2012) The institutional forms that are best for different social challenges (like equity, conditionality and additionality) remain an important but understudied part of the PES literature (Martin et al., 2014; Muradian and Rival, 2013, 2012, p 93) Thus our second major contribution has been to point out that PES schemes can clearly both extend some market forces (albeit incomplete), as well as provide spaces for contestation of these very 436 P McElwee et al / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440 processes In other words, “attempts to neo-liberalise nature are contingent on the existing values and practices of those who are the ultimate targets of governing,” (Higgins et al., 2012, p 384) As Mansfield has noted with regard to fisheries, a policy often defined as neoliberal “‘might be both a tool of dispossession and a tool for challenging dispossession” (Mansfield, 2007b, p 496) Our review of the international literature, as well as the case study in Vietnam, show that local actors can be successful in influencing where a PES scheme might fall on the continuum from “very neoliberal” to “non-neoliberal” The “contested neoliberalisation” that has accompanied some of these major PES policies shows that PES projects are not one-size-fits-all, and the promised simplicity and efficiency of market-led conservation has been overstated Indeed, local values of equity and justice have been able to win out over market efficiency in some contexts The successful transformation of some aspects of PES projects, namely the shift toward recognition of local equity demands in payments in Vietnam, or a focus on peasant and indigenous development goals in Mexico (McAfee and Shapiro-Garza, 2010), lends credence to the idea that these policies can indeed open up new spaces for participation and negotiation over rights Yet just because markets are not a functional part of most PES plans does not necessarily make them completely benign, however As Milne and Adams have noted, “the significance of the PES policy model lies in the political and social effects of its design and implementation, not in its functioning as a market per se” (Milne and Adams, 2012, p 136) Treating PES as political projects involving hybrid forms of governance reminds us these projects are “embedded in complex institutional and ecological contexts The design of a PES intervention typically involves political decisions about the users and the resource base that will be targeted, the conditions for the payments, the amount to be paid, and the overall goal of the policy” (Muradian and Rival, 2012, p 97) PES studies therefore need to focus on understanding these socio-institutional contexts, particularly notions of fairness and justice, as relative understandings of poverty and well-being among both users and providers of environmental services can influence community support for PES plans To conclude, future PES plans face many challenges, and researchers need to pay attention to the specific problems that accompany the continuum of non-market to market-like PES Researchers have already begun to this by moving away from overly simplistic analysis of “neoliberal natures.” Future approaches that instead offer empirical analysis of how and where PES is more successful than other policies, and when PES is inappropriate or unable to address systemic root issues, are clearly needed Additionally, paying attention to the contingent and contested nature of PES schemes, particularly where they can be adaptive and more flexible, such in response to provider and user demands, will be another important future area of research Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the National Science Foundation Geography and Regional Science Division grant #11028793: “Downscaling REDD policies in developing countries: Assessing the impact of carbon payments on household decision-making and vulnerability to climate change in Vietnam” The Vietnam team is also supported by a USAID Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research grant: “Research and capacity building on REDDỵ, livelihoods, and vulnerability in Vietnam: developing tools for social analysis of development planning” The Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA) of the International Development Research Centre (106269-00000000-019) also provided a grant to Vietnamese collaborators for fieldwork on PES issues in 2011 The support of Director Dr Hoang Van Thang, and assistance of Mr Le Toan, Mr Dao Minh Truong, and Ms Ha Thi Thu Hue of the Centre for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, and of Ms Ha Tu Anh of Tropenbos International Vietnam, is gratefully acknowledged Support in the field sites of Lam Dong was given by Vice-Director Le Hung, Mr Le Van 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The literature... Do payments for environmental services affect forest cover? A farm-level evaluation from Costa Rica Land Econ 88, 382e399 Arriagada, R .A. , Sills, E.O., Pattanayak, S.K., 2009 Combining qualitative