Abstract
This study discusses some insights for adaptive aquatic ecosystem management, based on evidence of upstream-downstream financial partnerships on watershed scales, or watershed-based Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs. Socioeconomic and watershed information on 13 advanced PES programs being implemented in 13 developing countries was collected and synthesized to analyze their partnership structures. Structured by the distributions of downstream payers and upstream payees within specific legislative tiers and hydrological orders, the PES partnerships revealed three important features with broad implications for aquatic ecosystem management: (1) institutional incentives for water resources, (2) participation units within the watersheds, and (3) organizing scopes for aquatic ecosystem management. In particular, as a reflection of organizing scopes, landscape entrepreneurship, or development of new organizations on the landscape, suggested two visions for adaptive aquatic ecosystem management: (1) connective lifestyles of individual stakeholders, with a transformation from benefiting from ecosystem services to providing conservation services, and (2) compatible technological innovations among organizational stakeholders, with a transformation from supplying latent and disconnected organizing services to strengthening systematic and accountable organizing services. This study is intended to provide a socioeconomic perspective to bridge the domains of water resources management, watershed management, and aquatic ecosystem management, in order to substantially promote diverse scales of stakeholder behavioral adaptations for the common mission of sustainable development in our societies.
Highlights
At a time of global climate change, societal resources are allocated largely based on the scales of targeted areas (Kollner et al, 2002; Ring, 2002; Hajkowicz, 2007)
The Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) approach suggests that participants can be coordinated (Landell-Mills & Porras, 2002; Gutman, 2003; Hartmann & Peterson, 2004; Wunder, 2005; Smith et al, 2006; Leimona et al, 2007; Forest Trends, 2007) to form financial partnerships based on economic incentives through contract transactions (Engel et al, 2008; Ferraro, 2008; Jack et al, 2008) between upstream payees and downstream payers mediated by agreed intermediaries (Figure 1 (a))
Downstream payers, and upstream payees, the PES partnerships revealed three main institutional incentives (Figure 1 (b)): (1) lifestyle adaptation of upstream payees to provide conservation services, (2) lifestyle adaptation of downstream payers to recognize the values of bundled conservation and ecosystem services, with ecosystem services provided by ecosystem functions, and (3) technological innovation by organizing intermediaries for supporting the lifestyle adaptations on the watershed scale
Summary
At a time of global climate change, societal resources are allocated largely based on the scales of targeted areas (Kollner et al, 2002; Ring, 2002; Hajkowicz, 2007). It is intended to provide a socioeconomic perspective to bridge the domains of water resources management, watershed management, and aquatic ecosystem management, in order to substantially promote stakeholder behavioral adaptations at diverse scales for the common mission of achieving sustainable development in our societies. In this pursuit, a set of advanced programs suitable for revealing their partnership structures was selected from among the 163 cases and analysed. The features of the PES partnerships with broader implications for aquatic ecosystem management are discussed, and their reflections on understanding the relationships among the three water management domains are explored
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