Abstract
Since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) highlighted the importance of ecosystem services for human well-being, the payments for such services have increasingly been drawing the attention of governments, the private sector and academia. Nonetheless, there is not yet a specific legal framework which is able to capture the complexity of managing natural resources and, at the same time, deal with the numerous drawbacks that have been identified by critics, who are opposed to using financialisation of the environment as a tool. This paper, after briefly summarizing some of the main features and criticisms of the Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), will critically assess the understanding of property rights over natural resources as stewardship, rather than as entitlement, because this interpretation is more coherent with the inherent characteristics of natural resources and, consequently, of ecosystem services. The novel usage of a stewardship dimension to property rights underlines the necessity for a legal framework for PES, constituted by “property-liability rules”.
Highlights
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are mechanisms whereby a buyer who benefits from an ecosystem service (ES) pays the provider of such a service [1]
Since stewardship requires the responsible management of the subject of the property rights [15,16], meaning that property rights have to be constrained by responsibilities [5], it is able to extend its operability beyond the actual compliance to the law
After a brief description of PES, their subject and their drawbacks, we have taken into account two characteristic of them: the complexity of ecosystem services which they regulate and the fact that they are voluntary mechanisms operating beyond what we have called the “line of compliance”
Summary
Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are mechanisms whereby a buyer who benefits from an ecosystem service (ES) pays the provider of such a service [1]. Quite to the contrary, the current way to conceive private property rights responds to an anthropocentric logic dominated by individual entitlements and private (mostly monetary) interests [5]. To overcome this conflict, this paper attempts to build an argument that PES should be provided within a legal framework and asks how this legal framework should be theoretically constructed. What are the desirable legal changes needed to set PES within the context of stewardship? What are the desirable legal changes needed to set PES within the context of stewardship? there are many academic contributions to the relationship between property law and environmental law, [6,7]
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