Struggles for recognitional justice through payments for ecosystem services contracts in Ecuador’s Andes

Abstract

Programs based upon payments for ecosystem services may carry pervasive attitudes, ideas, and language that confront pre-existing institutional arrangements for land management and local concepts of socio-environmental relationships. Through an empirical case study of a water trust fund payments for ecosystem services model in the Ecuadorian Andes, this research examines contracts as an important component of conservation incentive projects that can reveal contention over the representation of human-environment relationships and environmental governance institutions. The study highlights how neoliberal visions of environmental management are challenged and reworked by communities in an effort to gain justice through recognition and visibility for pre-existing collective land management practices. While this analysis demonstrates how underlying neoliberal assumptions about socioenvironmental relationships may inform water trust fund conservation interventions, it also shows the role of local agency in co-constituting landscape management outcomes and underscore the unevenness of neoliberalism present in the various components of a payments for ecosystem services model operating at different sites and scales.