Abstract
Vietnam’s Payment for Forest Ecosystem Services (PFES) scheme has the goal of protecting remaining natural forests by providing financial support to people involved in forest protection. However, studying the case of Dak Lak province in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam shows that even after eight years of PFES implementation, achieving this goal remains a challenge. Although PFES does provide a stable income source and higher payments than state forest protection programs, enables the mobilization of more personnel resources for patrolling forest and relieves a great burden on the state budget in terms of investment in forest protection and development, forest cover in Dak Lak province is still decreasing, mainly due to conversion for other land uses, especially commercial agricultural and industrial crops. These drivers are rooted in national socio-economic planning aimed at boosting economic growth and in local people’s need to sustain their livelihoods. In addition, our paper shows that illegal logging is still widespread in Dak Lak. Weak law enforcement in areas of forest managed by state forest authorities and state companies also contributes to deforestation. However, these drivers are neither fully recognized nor addressed, and instead, the blame for deforestation is laid on local communities. PFES alone cannot protect forests in Dak Lak province. It needs to be backed up by political commitment to address underlying drivers of deforestation, improved social programs to help local people diversify their income sources and clarity over land use.
Highlights
The international community has long seen Payment for Environmental Services (PES) as an approach with the potential to protect and enhance ecosystem services and contribute to poverty reduction in developing countries [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The Dak Lak Provincial Forest Protection and Development Fund (FPDF) under the Dak Lak Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD) is the authorized agency in charge of mobilizing, receiving and managing Payment for Forest Ecosystem Services (PFES) payments made by environmental service users and transferring them to environmental services providers to protect forests
The scale of deforestation caused by local people—our paper shows each household encroaching on an average 0.5 ha of forest—is much lower than natural forest loss in areas managed by large-scale forest companies, which receive the second-largest share of PFES payments
Summary
The international community has long seen Payment for Environmental Services (PES) as an approach with the potential to protect and enhance ecosystem services and contribute to poverty reduction in developing countries [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The most popular definition used by international scholars is Wunder’s (2005) framework, which sees PES as a voluntary, conditional transaction with at least one seller, one buyer and a well-defined environmental service [8]. An increasing number of studies are pointing out that PES should not be seen as a purely economic and market-based approach, but as an institutional approach to improve the relationship between the state and communities [11], and instead of focusing on the buyer and seller relationship, PES should be defined in terms of its additionality (what the environmental service status would be in the absence of PES) and linking it to offsite externalities [12]. Narrowing PES to an economic problem and solution creates technical and ethnical problems, if environmental services production and uses are driven by power asymmetries, and inequity exists in accessing and benefiting from these environmental services [9,14]
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