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Category: Mexico

Collective Local Payments for Ecosystem Services: new local PES between groups, sanctions, and prior watershed trust in Mexico

Alexander Pfaff, Luz Angela Rodriguez, Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza
Water Resources and Economics 28 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wre.2019.01.002

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Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programs are now high in number, if not always in impact. When groups of users pay groups of service providers, establishing PES involves collective action. We study the creation of collective PES institutions, and their continuation, as group coordination. We use framed lab-in-field experiments with hydroservices users and providers within watersheds participating in Mexico’s Matching Funds program in Veracruz, Yucatan and Quintana Roo states. We explore the coordination of contributions between downstream users and upstream providers, plus effects of different types of sanctions that can affect expectations for both users and providers. Both information alone and sanctions raise contributions overall, although outcomes varied by site in line with our rankings of ‘watershed trust’. For instance, monetary sanctions raise contributions in the watershed we ranked high in trust, yet initially lowered them for the lowest-trust watershed. This suggests that upstream-downstream social capital will be central to new collective local PES, while our overall trends suggest social capital can be raised by successful coordination over time.

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Increasing the Impact of Collective Incentives in Payments for Ecosystem Services

David A. Kaczan, Alexander Pfaff, Luz A. Rodriguez, Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2017.06.007

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Collective payments for ecosystem services (PES )programs make payments to groups, conditional on specified aggregate land-management outcomes.Such collective contracting may be well suited to settings with communal land tenure or decision-making. Given that collective contracting does not require costly individual-level information on outcomes, it may also facilitate conditioning on additionality (i.e., conditioning payments upon clearly improved outcomes relative to baseline). Yet collective contracting often suffers from free-riding, which undermines group outcomes and may be exacerbated or ameliorated by PES designs. We study impacts of conditioning on additionality within a number of collective PES
designs. We use a framed field-laboratory experiment with participants from a new PES program in Mexico. Because social interactions are critical within collective processes, we assess the impacts from conditioning on additionality given: (1) group participation in contract design, and (2) a group coordination mechanism. Conditioning on above-baseline outcomes raised contributions, particularly among initially lower contributors. Group participation in contract design increased impact, as did the coordination mechanism.

 

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Evolving Protected-Area Impacts in Mexico: Political Shifts as Suggested by Impact Evaluations

Alexander Pfaff, Franciso Santiago-Avila, Lucas Joppa
Forests 2017 8:17 doi:10.3390/f8010017

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For protected areas (PAs), variation in forest impacts over space—including types of PA—are increasingly well documented, while shifts in impacts over time receive less attention. For Mexico, in the 1990s, PAs effectively were ‘paper parks’. Thus, achieving impacts on the forest would require shifts over time in the politics of PA siting and PA implementation. We rigorously analyze the impacts of Mexican PAs on 2000–2005 loss of natural land cover, using matching to reduce location bias caused by typical land-use economics and politics. We find a 3.2% lower loss, on average, due to PAs. Since politics often vary by type of PA, we also show that in Mexico stricter PAs are closer to cities and have greater impact than mixed-use PAs. These shifts in impacts suggest some potential for PAs to conserve forests.

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Sequenced Road Investments & Clearing Of The Mayan Forest

Dalia Amor Conde, Alexander Pfaff
Draft working paper, Duke University.

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The Selva Maya is an important tropical forest, the second biggest in the Americas after the Amazon and the largest continuous forest patch of the ‘Mesoamerican hotspot’ which contains around 7% of the world species . Located across Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, Selva Maya is subject to different policy, cultural and historical influences and to a grand road expansion program that will intersect its core . Given its biological importance and the environmental services it provides at a local and global scale, this region is a good case to consider road impacts. We focus on four questions: 1) what are the short and medium term effects of paved and unpaved roads investments on deforestation?; 2) do these impacts differ when roads are placed in areas with existing pressure vs. in less developed locations?; 3) do the effect of non-road drivers also vary with development contexts? We might expect that roads in previously pristine areas a new road will be the dominant predictor; and 4) using a different measure of context, do road impacts vary across the countries?

 

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Paper Park Performance: Mexico’s Natural Protected Areas in the 1990s

Allen Blackman, Alexander Pfaff, Juan Robalino
Global Environmental Change 31 (2015) pp50-61

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Although developing countries have established scores of new protected areas over the past three decades, they often amount to little more than ‘‘paper parks’’ that are chronically short of the financial, human, and technical resources needed for effective management. It is not clear whether and how severely under-resourced parks affect deforestation. In principle, they could either stem it by, for example, creating an expectation of future enforcement, or they could spur it by, for example, creating open access regimes. We examine the effect of Mexico’s natural protected areas (NPAs) on deforestation from 1993 to 2000, a period when forest clearing was rampant and the vast majority of protected areas had negligible resources or management. We use high-resolution satellite data to measure deforestation and (covariate and propensity score) matching to control for NPAs’ nonrandom siting and for spillovers. Our broad finding is that Mexico’s paper parks had heterogeneous effects both inside and outside their borders. More specifically, at the national-level, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that NPAs had zero average effect on clearing inside their borders, nor can we reject a similar hypothesis for spillover clearing outside their borders. However, we can detect statistically and economically significant inside- and outside-NPA effects for certain geographic regions. Moreover, these effects have different signs depending on the region. Finally, we find that NPAs with certain characteristics were more effective at stemming deforestation inside their borders, namely, those that were large, new, mixed use, and relatively well-funded. Taken together, these results suggest that paper parks have the potential to either reduce or exacerbate tropical deforestation and highlight the need for further research on the conditions that lead to each outcome.

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