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Services: mobilising an
epistemic community to
construct dominant policy
ab
Jean Carlo Rodríguez de Francisco & Rutgerd
ac
Boelens
a
Environmental Sciences Department, Wageningen
University, Wageningen, The Netherlands
b
Environmental Policy and Natural Resources
Management Department, German Development
Institute-Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik
(DIE), Bonn, Germany
c
Centre for Latin American Research and
Documentation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
Published online: 17 Mar 2015.

To cite this article: Jean Carlo Rodríguez de Francisco & Rutgerd Boelens
(2015) Payment for Environmental Services: mobilising an epistemic community
to construct dominant policy, Environmental Politics, 24:3, 481-500, DOI:
10.1080/09644016.2015.1014658

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 Environmental Politics, 2015
Vol. 24, No. 3, 481–500, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2015.1014658

Payment for Environmental Services: mobilising an epistemic

community to construct dominant policy
Jean Carlo Rodríguez de Franciscoa,b* and Rutgerd Boelensa,c
a
Environmental Sciences Department, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The
Netherlands; bEnvironmental Policy and Natural Resources Management Department,
German Development Institute-Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), Bonn,
Germany; cCentre for Latin American Research and Documentation, University of
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Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The alleged capacity of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) to reach

conservation policy goals, while reducing poverty in a cost-effective manner,
makes it an extremely attractive development instrument for policymakers
and international funding agencies. This article reconstructs the process of
envisioning and building the National PES Strategy in Colombia. It reveals
how this conservation policy has resulted from the mobilisation of the
transnational/national PES epistemic community and its globally expanding
discourse. The influential PES network generates internally defined stan-
dards of success that proceed without reference to empirical evidence as to
the impacts of the implemented policies. PES adoption is influenced by
regulatory instruments’ unsatisfactory outcomes, the ways in which mar-
ket-environmentalist models induce profound indifference towards on-the-
ground policy impacts, the discursive power and alignment properties of the
PES policy epistemic community, and financial and political pressures by
international banks and environmental NGOs.
Keywords: Payment for Environmental Services; policy model; epistemic
community; development; Colombia

Introduction
Payment for Environmental Services (PES) is currently one of the most popular
market-based policy instruments designed to conserve natural resources. PES
projects are reward schemes in which landowners are compensated with money
or in-kind direct payments for the land management practices they contribute
(Wunder 2005, FAO 2007). By providing economic incentives, PES encourages
landowners to build nature’s economic value into their management plans,
thereby improving the provision of specific environmental services.

*Corresponding author. Email: jeancarlorod@gmail.com

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 482 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
In many regions of the world, particularly in the South, areas with strategic
natural resources and important ecosystem services tend to coincide spatially
with areas that are struck by rural poverty. PES portrays this as an important and
strategic development opportunity (Kosoy et al. 2007), and the promotion of
PES is commonly legitimated with reference to its potential impacts in terms of
entwined conservation and poverty alleviation (WWF 2006, FAO 2007,
UNEP 2011). This win–win assumption, together with the predicted cost-
effectiveness of PES relative to command and control policies and the reduction
of public expenditure to reach conservation policy goals (Repetto 1987,
Pattanayak et al. 2010), has made PES an extremely attractive economic instru-
ment for international donors, environmental and development agents, and
policymakers in developing nations.
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Protecting watersheds, by installing schemes in which actors who ‘provide

environmental services’ will sell these to the ‘users of these services’ and invest
the income generated thereby in conservation activities, is among the main PES
targets. In a recent study by the US non-profit research organisation Forest
Trends, Bennett et al. (2012) report that watershed environmental services
were bought in no less than 117 million hectares around the world, for a total
of USD8 billion, between 2008 and 2011. ‘We are witnessing the early stages of
a global response that could transform the way we value and manage the world’s
watersheds’, said Michael Jenkins, president and chief executive of Forest
Trends (Provost 2013).
Aside from the recent critical studies by political ecologists,1 the socio-
economic impact of PES has received surprisingly little policy attention.
Bennett et al. (2012) find that only 16 of the 205 watershed PES projects
analysed were subject to some form of socio-economic monitoring. However,
even though the research recognises the ‘worryingly little socioeconomic mon-
itoring that appears to be taking place’, the report strongly recommends the ‘[…]
widespread adoption of PES [as] a key part of any strategy for ensuring secure
and sustainable water systems’ (Bennett et al. 2012, pp. viii, ix).
Despite the lack of empirical evidence of its social benefits,2 PES receives
strong support from public environmental organisations as a successful, equitable
conservation instrument. We expose this issue by illustrating the development of
PES in Colombia. Particularly, we reconstruct the process of developing the
National PES Strategy adopted in Colombia in 2008. We show how this national
strategy is the result of the mobilisation of the PES transnational/national net-
work, which generates internally defined standards of success that proceed
without reference to empirical evidence as to the impacts of the implemented
policies. As Mosse (2004, p. 639) argued, in another regional context: ‘despite
the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in develop-
ment, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models
and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize’. Rap
(2006) explains that this lack of attention to actual events relates to the fact that
policy models are claimed to be successful from the outset. For this to occur, and
 Environmental Politics 483
actually to become successful, a policy model requires an influential institutional
and discursive network that produces but also promotes and extends the model
by means of alliance building. Haas has framed this as epistemic communities:
‘networks of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a
particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within
that domain’ (1992, p. 3).3 The epistemic community influences policy models
but is also influenced by its production. In this sense, the workings of the
epistemic community hinder what Bourdieu called the epistemic reflexivity of
its members, and reduce the capacity of its members to analyse critically their
own theoretical and methodological presuppositions (Coghlan and
Brannick 2005).
The following section conceptually examines how policy-making and its
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assumptions are socially produced discourses that frame, stabilise, and help to
disseminate policy models among stakeholders. They simultaneously create a
particular (virtual) reality and tend to generate indifference towards ‘on-the-
ground existing realities’ and diverse ‘alternative realities’. The third section
scrutinises how the research data were gathered and processed, in order to
examine the creation of the National PES Strategy and how PES was conceived
as a win–win mechanism by Colombian advocates of PES. The fourth section
discusses the findings of the literature and archival research and the interviews,
in the light of the theories presented. The conclusion makes a plea for a critical
approach towards adopting PES as a policy instrument. A market approach for
conservation may be a suitable intervention in some contexts, but we question
the fact that PES is uncritically made into national law. This phenomenon is
worrying since the evidence shows that PES schemes tend to reproduce rural
inequality rather than address the social injustices provoked by natural resource
management and development interventions.

PES policy modelling, experts, and reality construction

By simplifying out the multiple goals, roles, sources of identity and affiliation, and
worldviews within which the so-called rational decision-making of economic actors is
embedded, we lose all but peripheral vision of the roles of social factors and commu-
nity in how people relate to and deal with their commons. (McCay 2001, p. 186)

PES policy aims to establish, within highly diverse localities, the need for reform
in accordance with the PES model’s fundamental principles and concepts, which
it considers to have universal validity and operational force. Basic to the policy’s
working is also its reference to self-acclaimed achievements; these relate to
claiming the fulfilment of its objectives that combine environmental conservation
and poverty alleviation. Thereby, the policy model establishes a set of guidelines
in order to replicate its (acclaimed) achievements. For this, however, the PES
model needs an epistemic community of active supporters to frame it as a
success (Ferguson 1990, Mosse 2004, Rap 2006). This means that the policy
 484 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
model (a programmatic, grand strategy including a set of guidelines to achieve
particular goals) and project implementation (the means through which the policy
model is executed in the field) are profoundly entwined discursive partners; their
intimate relationship is not necessarily based on existing realities. Policies shape
projects, and, in turn, projects are successful because they sustain policy models.
As Mosse shows through his research on water development in India, actual
project results in the field are less important for policymakers, donors, and
project implementers. He states that ‘the gap between policy and practice is
constantly negotiated away’ (2004, p. 664). Indeed, Rap (2006) explains how a
policy model is subject to continuous processes of production and promotion.
For this, it requires the mobilisation and maintenance of political consent among
the epistemic community to which it is directed.
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The workings of power in policy-making and implementation are therefore

crucial; policy models act as spectacles that organise complex realities, as
discourses they organise and predict reality. At the same time, they induce the
models’ acceptance by the members and ever more ‘outsiders’, and provision of
other explanatory elements. Policy models and their norms organise objects and
subjects in (newly shaped) reality and hierarchies: as Foucault (1975) argued,
such models aim to make epistemic community members and an ever-increasing
number of potential project allies (donors, policymakers, legislators, resource
managers, and users) self-organise in the framework of this policy and conform
to its rules of conduct.
The larger and more stable (‘powerful’) the epistemic community in which
policy concepts are defined and through which projects and policy outcomes are
assumed (or interpreted), the stronger its successes. The epistemic community
provides standards, categories, measurement instruments, causal models, logical
relationships, and criteria for understanding policy implications and success
(Zito 2001); it aims to align actors and points of views. Therefore, project
practices institute and protect sets of representations, which in turn serve to
interpret policy models’ activities, measure their performance, and define their
success. This was demonstrated by Ferguson (1990) for water development in
Lesotho, Mosse (2004) for India, Rap (2006) for Mexico, Boelens and
Zwarteveen (2005) for Chile, and Sitoe et al. (2012) for carbon politics in
Mozambique. Likewise, the success of PES policy formulation and implementa-
tion depends on how experts and agencies are able to tie other actors and
interests to the expert’s PES rationality. According to Mosse, this results in
particular practices of discursive alignment in development and funding agen-
cies: ‘… policy discourse among international donors struggles to ensure that
practices are rendered coherent in terms of a single overarching framework rather
than celebrating a diversity of approaches or the multiplicity of rationalities and
values’ (2003, p. 19).
Simultaneously, it is common to see scientific policy experts and develop-
ment professionals work to confirm and not contradict the principles and
assumptions of the models they are following and framing. These models
 Environmental Politics 485
validate their identities as professionals and experts and confirm their achieve-
ments. As Mosse says, ‘they ensure coalitions of support and justify the flow of
resources’ (2004, p. 664). He concludes that, even though project practice is
entirely stubborn and actual results are often unpredictable, ‘everybody is parti-
cularly concerned with making, protecting, elaborating and promoting models
with the power to organize authoritative interpretations, concealing operational
realities, re-enforcing given models and limiting institutional learning’ (2004,
p. 664).
In the field of policy-making, experts and planners often cannot grasp or
accommodate (within the policy model) what the implications of their models
will be when actually implemented in local communities and watersheds
(Anders 1980). This is greatly enhanced by the technical framing of conservation
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and water management, an a-political conceptualisation that frames its own

reality and largely neglects the on-the-ground, complex realities where it is
applied and has little sense of how these realities are changed by technocratic
intervention. Consequently, ‘economic and technical rightness’ is presented as
neutral, devoid of moral and cultural meaning, and devoid of social relations and
political interests.
Indeed, there is a strong tendency for hydro-policy modelling exercises,
invented for universal application and then applied in the Andean countries, to
separate theoretical outcomes from multidimensional reality (Boelens and
Vos 2012). In general, the epistemic community does not really have to deal
with the social results of their projects. The epistemic community is not obliged
to do so; when the project’s funding comes to an end, the experts go back home,
and institutional, economic, and scientific incentives do not relate to actual
improvements in the field. Commonly, their contribution to the model ‘has
been established’ and their credits are not based on the logic of improvement
in the eyes of the on-the-ground communities. Consequently, even though the
promotion of ‘accountability’ among actors is a major theoretical–conceptual
cornerstone of market environmentalism, expert institutes and agents themselves
cannot be held accountable. In the field, such impacts (e.g. erosion of community
institutions, uncompensated land-use restrictions, land eviction) exist but remain
invisible since they are not measured, or are interpreted under the logic of the
PES implementers (Goldman 1997, De Vos et al. 2006, Li 2007, Boelens and
Vos 2012). Similarly, ‘when presented with “contradicting empirical data”,
policy experts remain indifferent, as their main concern is to continue to under-
write and stabilize the assumptions in the face of high uncertainty, complexity,
and polarization’ (Roe 1994, p. 2, cited in Rap 2006, p. 1303).
After presenting our methodology, the following sections explore the PES
policy-making process in Colombia in order to comprehend the background of
the nearly blind adoption and rapid proliferation of PES and the meaning of
market environmentalism’s ‘success’.
 486 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
Methods
Our work is based on the first author’s engagement with Colombia’s environ-
mental sector, from 2002 to 2006, during which he was involved in the design
and implementation of economic incentives for conservation, such as PES. From
2010 to 2013, we compiled the complementary literature review, based on the
documents (case studies, legal developments, conference reports) that led to the
implementing of PES as a national strategy.
Additionally, in 2010, 2011, and 2014, semi-structured interviews were
conducted with representatives of several environmental organisations working
on and advocating for PES. These organisations include the Ministry of
Environment (2 interviews), the National Park Service (2), Conservation
International (1), Patrimonio Natural (2), and the Alexander von Humboldt
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Research Institute (2 interviews). The interviewees were involved in PES pro-

grammes within their organisations, serving mainly as biologists, ecologists, and
economists. Some of the interviewees were colleagues of the first author. The
interviews concerned the interviewees’ arguments and justification for adopting a
PES National Strategy, the degree of evidence of success of PES, the state of the
art regarding socio-economic impacts monitoring of PES, and the relationships
among national environmental organisations and PES funding organisations.
Analysis was based on comparing reports and interviews in order to unravel
concurrences and discrepancies between discourses. This information was eval-
uated against how social impacts were monitored in the projects (see below) that
served as a basis on which to establish the PES National Strategy. Further
background water politics and contextual water research is provided by the
second author’s two-decade involvement in Andean natural resource manage-
ment and regional policy investigation.

The National PES Strategy

Towards a new policy
In the late 1990s, a series of administrative, institutional, and legal project
developments rapidly set the context in which discussing PES started in
Colombia, paving the way ‘forward’ towards a National PES Strategy
(Mendoza-Páez and Moreno-Díaz 2009, Mendoza-Páez 2010). Initially, an influ-
ential ad hoc group, Grupo de Incentivos para la Conservación y Uso Sostenible
de la Diversidad Biológica, with multiple links to the World Bank and GEF
(Global Environmental Facility), was created around 1999. Its role was to discuss
how actually to reinforce the implementation of market instruments and eco-
nomic incentives for conservation in Colombia (see Hernández-Pérez 2000).4
The member organisations of this group had all received GEF financial resources
necessary to consolidate PES in Colombia, since the early 1990s (GEF 2010).
Membership of this group included national public organisations, such as the
Alexander von Humboldt Research Institute, the National Park Service, and the
 Environmental Politics 487
National Planning Department. It also included national private organisations,
such as the Civil Society Reserves Network and the World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF). Among the many activities that this group coordinated were several
regional discussion forums to introduce a conservation approach based on
market-incentives, given the discontent of the environmental sector with the
performance of ‘command and control’ instruments. They also organised several
capacity-building activities on environmental economics and produced a number
of PES publications (see Hernández-Pérez 2000).
The interactions (both institutional and personal) among members of this
non-officialised ‘PES policy group’ came to form the core of the PES epistemic
community. While in the beginning the market-environmentalist theories and
policy concepts followed the flow of international funding (‘country-inwards’),
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the promotion of PES strategies and concepts soon became a subtle two-way
affair between national and international ‘desk-officers’. Field-based contextual
knowledge of Andean community relationships and their grounded natural
resource management practices was the most important factor missing from
this PES-knowledge construction game (Boelens et al. 2014). Many of the
members of the group were advancing the design or were directly involved in
the implementation of several PES projects that served as reference points and
showcases in developing the National PES Strategy.
Examples of such projects were the Chaina Project and the Regional
Integrated Silvopastoral Ecosystem Management Project (RISEMP). The
Chaina watershed PES was implemented in 2005–2006 as part of the GEF-
Andes programme (World Bank 2001, Borda et al. 2010). The RISEMP project
was also implemented under the auspices of the GEF in 2002 (GEF 2002,
Pagiola et al. 2004, Zapata et al. 2007). Other PES projects used to make the
case for constructing the PES National Strategy were the Cauca Valley Project
(see Echavarría 2002) and the Chinchina watershed PES (see Hernández-Pérez
et al. 2004, Blanco et al. 2005). Despite the importance given to these projects in
national policy discourse, all these interventions share the same characteristic up
to 2008: there was no, or only superficial, monitoring of their socio-economic
impacts. This is remarkable, considering that the first evidence from similar
projects in the region already showed negative impacts for the poorest families’
livelihood and security (Osborne 2011, 2013, Rodríguez-de-Francisco
et al. 2013, Rodríguez-de-Francisco and Boelens 2014).
This fact is especially noteworthy to highlight since it appears that key actors
in the policy construction process explicitly claimed that (despite lacking evi-
dence and monitoring) PES implementation was to be reinforced because of,
among other reasons, its strong capacities to alleviate poverty and reduce social
stratification. The following quote from the former World Bank manager in
Colombia, Ruiz-Soto (2014), is illustrative: ‘The persons who, like me, sup-
ported PES, argued that it is a market intervention to redistribute benefits,
particularly, to those poor farmers living in mountainous areas. Earlier,
 488 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
conservation and agricultural prohibition were forced on them without any
compensation’.
In parallel to the above-mentioned projects combining ‘conservation and
poverty alleviation’, the explicit inclusion of PES in President Uribe’s national
development plans (Law 1151 of 2007) further strengthened the PES policy
climate at that time. Again, this was done before evidence of positive socio-
economic impacts could be provided. This was later followed up by the implicit
inclusion of PES in President Santo’s policies (Law 1450 of 2011) and Decree
953 (in 2013), establishing that Departments and Municipalities had the obliga-
tion to invest no less than 1% of their regular income to purchase land or pay for
environmental services in zones that were important to water supply for local
water supply systems.
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Amidst an explosive rise in international funding for PES policy implemen-

tation projects by multilateral agencies, and in the context of the legal inclusion
of PES in the national development plan, the Ministry of Environment, National
Park Service, WWF, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and Conservation
International (CI) organised the National Conference on Environmental
Services in February 2007 (Taller Nacional de Servicios Ambientales). Juan
Lozano, then Minister of Environment, explained prior to the workshop that

there are important opportunities for different rural communities to sell environ-
mental services … therefore it is necessary to establish a new agenda in which
environmental conservation efforts are economically recognized… Here we have
the most important PES experts and the world’s most renowned organizations,
willing to help us design these compensation schemes and to join with Colombia so
we conserve our natural resources. (Minambiente 2007)

The aim of this workshop was to promote implementation of the National PES
Strategy, with international experts brought in to present the major benefits of
PES. Besides the presentation of mainly international (and successful) experi-
ences, the workshop centred on defining the types of environmental services that
the national strategy should prioritise and how to devise institutional arrange-
ments (e.g. public, private, and public–private partnerships) best suited for
implementing the national strategy. The epistemic community also discussed
payment mechanisms and scales of action, the support system that different
national environmental institutions should provide for PES, as well as how to
overcome any bottlenecks when implementing the national strategy.
Crafting of the National PES Strategy was finalised in 2008. According to the
Ministry, the strategy’s overall goal was to facilitate and guide implementation of
PES throughout Colombia, and to establish PES as a tool to meet the objectives
of environmental and social policy associated with the conservation and restora-
tion of natural ecosystems (Minambiente 2008). Among its specific objectives,
we highlight: support implementation and knowledge generation regarding PES;
coordinate all the different international plans and economic support for
 Environmental Politics 489
conservation; promote coordination among environmental authorities, local pri-
vate sector, NGOs, and other organisations around PES; improve the quality of
life for the most vulnerable communities settled in areas of conservation; restore
natural resources and environmental services (Minambiente 2008).
Juan Lozano, former Minister of Environment, explained that ‘Colombia
wants to be the front-runner in the region with respect to PES, as the
Government recognizes PES’ importance in conservation and for those who
might benefit from conservation’ (Minambiente 2007).
Having illustrated the background of the PES National Strategy, we turn to
the discursive production of PES by its epistemic community in Colombia.
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PES-speak
Watershed environmental services are like your mobile phone service, if you don’t
pay for it you cannot make a call. (World Bank staff, pers. comm., September 2006)

After the publication of the National PES Strategy in 2008, Agreement 116
mapped out different PES projects in Colombia, identifying 35 ongoing PES
initiatives. Out of this latter set, 13 initiatives received support as pilot projects
for the National PES Strategy (Arango-Moreno and Fandiño-Orozco 2011).5
Even though tangible results in the Colombian field were still lacking, all of
the officials interviewed expressed their profound faith in the new policy. PES,
they argued, proposes a logical solution that addresses the need for conservation
services required to sustain economic growth while fostering poverty alleviation.
As a Ministry of Environment staff member explained, ‘this solution addresses
the environmental public sector’s deficit in developing nations, where economic
funding is made available to conserve our natural heritage without excluding
rural communities from economic development’ (pers. comm., December 2011).
Indeed, the Ministry of Environment specifically highlights how PES can be a
win–win situation for conservation and poverty alleviation: ‘One advantage of
PES is that it manages that the users of environmental services compensate those
peasants who contribute to conserve natural resources. In this way, their
[peasants’] economic condition is improved’ (Minambiente 2007).
Furthermore, besides belief in the modern policy tool, state officials and
national NGO staff also expressed more strategic, instrumental arguments for
trusting the workings of PES. It appeared that one of the main elements explain-
ing PES introduction in Colombian institutes was the influence by development
banks and international NGOs in driving, and sometimes forcing, the adoption of
these instruments. State officials and NGO staff members knew perfectly well
that funding would be made available only when they explicitly and ‘correctly’
responded to particular PES rationality requirements. Speaking the same lan-
guage as the international PES epistemic community and aligning with the
model’s social and technical policy components and messages are therefore
crucial. One Ministry of Environment staff member expressed it thus:
 490 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
the way in which development and conservation projects are financed, nowadays,
requires the inclusion of certain catchwords that bring your proposal into line with
certain global trends. Currently, this global axiom is largely set around climate
change and economic instruments for conservation – so, paying or getting discounts
for conservation. Developed countries paying developing countries for the seques-
tered carbon in their forest, regional and local water users paying local landowners
in the mountains to conserve water, and so forth. (Pers. comm., December 2011)

Incentive and power structures, including funding and promotion opportunities,

in the state institutions and development agencies pressure their staff to express
themselves, their jobs, their programs and their proposals through PES DevSpeak
(or Development Speak, after Orwell’s 1984 ‘Newspeak’ (Orwell 1949); see also
Ferguson (1990) and Mosse (2004). PES-speak enables communication and
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agreement within the policy epistemic community and understanding of environ-

mental problems through the prevailing policy model of market environmental-
ism, while pushing for its replication. As the World Bank (2008, p. 4) phrased it
from the outset, ‘the project’s replicability and scaling up is an objective’.
Despite the fact that the officials and professionals interviewed for this piece
did not simply absorb PES, they were compelled to ‘strategically use market-
rational discourses’ to justify the inescapability and strong necessity of having a
PES policy for conservation. PES-speak presents a language to bring together
heterogeneous actors and diverse local realities in order to have them speak of
the same type of reductionist needs and problems and offer the same type of
reductionist intervention solutions. Interviewees were often not aware that their
responses – largely leaning on ‘rational, objective solutions’, ‘good governance’,
‘most efficient resource use’, and so forth – neglected all local particularities of
the Colombian cases they were supposed to talk about. They also neglected all
references to unequal power relationships, including those among local groups in
PES projects, and those among PES funders, experts, officials, and local farmers.
The de-politicisation of institutional effects and the (conscious or
unconscious) failure to recognise complexity make it possible to imagine con-
servation as a rationally plannable economic/engineering process seeking global
solutions based on globalised concepts and expert tools. It enables envisioning
environmental projects as ‘neutral’ efforts to socially engineer ‘objectively best’
watershed management plans for all local situations; it does so according to the
lessons of ‘best practice’, no matter how great local diversity and power differ-
entials may be. Characteristically, during our interviews, not only were the
problems (regarding local environmental degradation, water scarcity, rights and
property, and poverty) viewed in market-environmentalist terms, but the sup-
posed remedies of valuation, intervention, and standardisation were based on
global, uniform expert models divorced from context.
Some of the same (ex)colleagues, who in the years 2002–2006 were pro-
foundly sceptical about PES and its one-dimensional rationality, are now work-
ing on the PES implementation projects that they themselves have formulated.
When asked about the environmental impacts of PES, our interviewees referred
 Environmental Politics 491
to the great amount of scientific literature analysing PES experiences all over the
world. For instance, a CI staff member, referring to no other field evidence than
the (forthcoming or expected) PES results and the (conceptual) discussions
within the aforementioned ad hoc group on economic incentives, argued ‘that,
besides PES, the country has ample experience with implementing economic
incentives for conservation’, and that these experiences ‘represent valuable
knowledge that can be used to foresee PES environmental impacts’ (pers.
comm., February 2012). Similarly, a Ministry of Environment officer repeated
the international success discourses about projects that have mostly lacked on-
the-ground PES’ impact monitoring:

There is sound environmental knowledge on PES positive impacts on conservation,

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some examples are the presentations during the Taller Nacional de Servicios
Ambientales and a vast amount of PES scientific publications analysing this
topic. Another indication is the international support that global organisations of
much prestige such as UNEP, FAO and many international NGOs are giving to this
innovative solution. (Pers. comm., December 2011)

The interviews and reports showed how truth claims, embedded in the model
underpinning this highly influential PES policy, were transmitted uncritically
through the diverse layers of Colombian/transnational expert networks. Beyond
scientific workers and their desk work, international donors, development NGOs,
and state agencies adopted the PES discourse and its client-oriented, economic–
technocentric rationality. In just a few years, this entailed huge changes, not just
in national academia and development institutions, but most of all in ‘on-the-
ground’ in PES implementation schemes. The latter quickly projected their
rationality on Andean forest- and water-user communities and their common
property relationships. PES-speak rapidly became the current language in
Colombian conservation schemes, similar to what Goldman (1997, p. 33)
depicts:

For development experts to assert that they have a game plan for making productive
relations on common property ‘better’, ‘more efficient’ and ‘sustainable’, they first
have to construct a world of values and property relations which befits an imagined
reality. To do so, they must agree to a definition of property – as well as appropriate
mechanisms for interpreting the ‘true value’ of property and natural resources (for
example, prices) – however far removed these definitions are from the irreducible
material activities of highly diverse, resource-dependent communities.

Regarding social impacts, interviewees highlighted the benefit of the incomes

that conservation payments mean for environmental service providers. Some
stressed that, for this to happen, PES would first require the establishment of
local institutions that can re-create market-based interaction (for example, Water
User Associations as organised environmental services demanders). However,
when asked about the issues that are characteristically outside the PES model’s
 492 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
domain (such as power, cultural impacts, and the skewed distribution of access to
natural resources along class, gender, and ethnic lines), all interviewees pointed
out that relevant evidence has yet to be discovered. Nevertheless, they explained
that, despite lack of evidence at the moment, they were confident about the
outcomes of such an evaluation. As a staff member of the NGO Patrimonio
Natural commented, ‘this is a specific point in the pilots receiving support from
the Agreement 116, as this is still on-going research’ (pers. comm., March 2012).
There were similar views regarding the analysis of PES schemes’ impact on
power differentials among natural resources stakeholders and how this might
influence and extend social inequality due to PES’ introduction. All of the
interviewees (while highlighting the issue’s ‘obvious importance’) mentioned
that, as of 2014, this topic had yet to be included in PES analysis. One CI
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staff member explained, with a sense of mixed enthusiasm and embarrassment,

that this theme had not crossed his organisation’s mind:

I believe that such a topic is of special importance in the Colombian and developing
nations’ context as it addresses the very differences and differentiation that exist
among natural resource users. It can be explanatory of all the inequality that we see
in the rural areas. This is a topic that needs to be addressed in order to refine PES.
(Pers. comm., February 2012)

Discussion
Before consolidating and examining local Colombian experiences and gaining
in-house national knowledge on the social impacts of PES on the poorest
members of society, the Colombian epistemic community had already uncriti-
cally elevated PES to a national strategy. The creation of a PES policy model in
Colombia was based on several pressures and assumptions that have strongly
contributed to this rather uncritical adoption and conforming to an international
trend. Rather than presenting an exhaustive list, we have illustrated how the
international PES epistemic community creates the necessity among natural
resource management experts and policymakers to explain (presumably) existing
reality in terms of PES jargon, either by creating funding and career opportunities
dependent on the application of PES-speak, or by inducing in the very mindset of
PES agents (policymakers and implementers) the internalisation of PES ration-
ality. The resulting ‘reality-indifference’ and lack of epistemic reflexivity rein-
forces several uncritical assumptions.
Firstly, environmental management interventions are perceived as merely
technical projects, quite distant from political interventions. Indeed, a careful
study of the seminal work on economic incentives in Colombia (Hernández-
Pérez 2000), the summary of the Taller de Servicios Ambientales (Ortega 2008),
the National PES Strategy (Minambiente 2008), the methodological guide for the
implementation of PES (Minambiente 2012), and subsequent reports (see
Arango-Moreno and Fandiño-Orozco 2011) makes it clear that all present
 Environmental Politics 493
conservation and market-environmentalist interventions are just technical and
rather mechanical endeavours. Little or no reference is made to key issues, such
as the distribution of and access to natural resources; how market-based con-
servation necessarily implies new ways of conceiving and introducing property
rights; new means of control over natural resources; and a fundamentally differ-
ent vision of nature–society relationships.
These conservation policies and projects inevitably have transformative
effects on socio-natural landscapes and power relations (Robbins 2004,
West 2006, Himley 2009, Boelens et al. 2014), whereby different actors strate-
gically use their power to advance their own agendas. Little is said about how
market conservation might block or constrain the livelihoods of the poor. Instead,
PES is viewed as an instrument that enables rural life by providing the income
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that rural families need in order to stay in the rural areas (Appleton 2008). This
assumes that all natural resource users are supposed to be uniformly responding
to economic incentives, or that earning money equals making a livelihood.
This leads to the second assumption, which is that the PES policy epistemic
community understands PES-based social impacts strictly within the PES con-
ceptual framework itself, and not with respect to the multidimensional character
of poverty, social reality, and the politics that drive this reality. This was a
commonality found in all the national projects and policy documents, as well
as in the majority of the interviews, that we analysed. PES rationality assumes
the creation of extra income opportunities for the poor. Therefore, if new sources
of income are created, PES is deemed to be socially and economically successful.
Furthermore, there is no explicit analysis of how PES might create trade-offs
with respect to rural livelihoods or forms of peasant conservation. Related to this
is the fact that in order to function, PES requires particular social institutions and
norms to be in place. Otherwise, these (market-environmentalist) institutions
need to be introduced as the new way of governing the local context. If these
institutions, which allow for PES to be operational, are set in place and strength-
ened, it is deemed successful.
It is surprising that no analysis has been done to examine PES’ impacts on
those institutions that have been functioning (often for a very long time) outside
the PES or market-environmental model. It is apparent that the ‘success’ of PES
is entirely skewed and geared towards confirming and conforming to the model.
For instance, PES’ problematic impacts on non-commoditised resources and
relationships (Kosoy and Corbera 2010, Büscher et al. 2012, Boelens
et al. 2014) that constitute local agricultural production, peasant organisations,
and cultural institutions tend to be entirely sidelined. This (technocratic) blind
eye for monitoring ‘what PES brings’ (in terms of socio-economic results and
poverty alleviation) and for ‘what PES destroys’ (in terms of locally existing
livelihood relationships) is further enhanced by the short-term results required by
funding agencies; these are conditions whereby monitoring systems are omitted
and success is only measured in terms of ‘PES implementation’, and not in
relation to the impacts the project produces.
 494 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
In local territory and watershed realities, several studies have shown
(Mayer 2002, Rodríguez-de-Francisco et al. 2013, Boelens et al. 2014) that
there are already multiple ways to ‘compensate and reattribute environmental
services’, based on, for instance, reciprocal working relationships in and among
Andean communities. However, local ways to manage and place value on water
resources are not seen or judged in their own right (or even on the basis of water
use efficiency or marginal returns). Instead, they are judged in terms of the
‘expert’ ideal universal model. They tend to be viewed as obstacles to modern
water control, to be removed in order to pave the way towards environmental
governance modernisation.
The evidence provided here bears witness to the fact that, in the global South,
mainstream experts designing conservation interventions are more concerned
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with consolidating a trendy and universalist policy model than understanding

its social impacts in contexts of high social complexity and inequity. This does
not imply, however, that mainstream water or market-environmentalist experts
can be portrayed simply as ‘wicked persons who mislead actual reality’. On the
contrary, they are subjects of, and subject to, the same game. For example,
McAfee and Shapiro (2010) have shown how PES designers and practitioners
tend to be keen on persuading the poor to participate in PES; these actors are not
aware of, or are unable to grasp, the problematic results of their intervention, and
strive to persuade despite concerns regarding the efficiency of conservation
spending. In this respect, Foucault argued that the process of ‘subjectification’
and self-disciplining leads to people’s incapability to have an independent handle
on the reach of their own thinking and acting. Anders provides an important
complementary perspective, pointing at how the state of technology and scien-
tific model-making – and people’s institutional embeddedness – make our moral
imagination lag behind and restrain the capacity to give a balanced moral
opinion.

Whether people really grasp what is happening first and foremost depends on the
moral situation they are in. Property relations, labour divisions, thought-imposition,
political violence, and so forth, determine such a situation. These issues mean that
we are indifferent or actually worry about the things that are fundamental to us.
(Anders cited in Notenboom 1979, p. 15)

Indeed, the capacity of experts to understand what they are preaching is strongly
related to the webs of power and technology of which they are part. Foucault
stresses the power-truth contents of (among others, expert) knowledge; Anders
emphasises the distance between experts’ knowledge and their creative capacity
to imagine the consequences of their technological interventions. Furthermore,
the discursive construction of conservation intervention’s political neutrality
certainly obscures the experts’ capacity to see the social impacts created or
enhanced by particular policy tools.
 Environmental Politics 495
Conclusions
Modern PES policies promise to accelerate ‘progress’ through planned develop-
ment and guarantee control over the state of nature through advanced science,
material wealth, and effective governance through markets. The idea is that local
imperfection and inefficiencies will disappear as people realise the effectiveness
of rational, modern technocracy to foster watershed conservation and water
management development needs.
This set of market-environmentalist notions is taken up by national organisa-
tions because of fierce promotion by international donors, rather than relying on
actual on-the-ground impacts, and it is becoming increasingly popular and
powerful. As we have shown, the popularity of PES is not only based on the
strong influence by international donors towards PES adoption and the general
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disenchantment with the conventional command and control approach but on the
discursive power of the rapidly growing, subjectifying PES-speak epistemic
community. It is additionally influenced by the need felt by national institutes
and their researchers to secure funding for projects, to protect their jobs, and to
relate their organisations and name to so-called successful implementations;
success in doing so provides credentials for better networking, new project
tenders, and jobs.
Denial of connections between power and knowledge and the hidden moral-
ism of ‘good natural resource governance’ and ‘rational resource use’, coupled
with the status of being a representative of scientific reason, make the expert into
a powerful political actor who, behind the mask of neutrality, supports (often
unconsciously, by not clearly grasping PES’ social impacts) the justification of
far-reaching reforms and interventions.
Rather than simply critique PES, our foremost concern is to assess critically
the naive adoption of PES. Our conclusion calls for far more profound, con-
textualised, and power-critical studies of PES’ social impacts. In conjunction
with understanding how scientific policy rationality and institutional develop-
ment conditions support uncritical implementation of PES, reinforce PES-speak,
and generate indifference towards ‘the field’, this also requires an on-the-ground
understanding of how PES influences multilayered socio-natural realities and
affects, in particular, marginalised communities and families.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes
1. See, for example, Boelens et al. (2014), Brockington (2011), Büscher and Fletcher
(2014), Büscher et al. (2012), Bumpus and Liverman (2008), Gilbertson and Reyes
(2009), Kosoy and Corbera (2010), Lohmann (2010, 2011), McAfee and Shapiro
(2010), Mcelwee (2012), Milne and Adams (2012), Newell and Paterson (2010),
Pokorny et al. (2012), Rodríguez-de-Francisco and Budds (2014), Sullivan (2009).
 496 J.C. Rodríguez de Francisco and R. Boelens
2. Wunder (2008) explains that, while private PES schemes tend to focus on environ-
mental goals alone, publicly financed ones aim at conservation and poverty allevia-
tion together (see also Pagiola et al. 2010).
3. The different policy areas tend to have an excluding set of experts called a policy
network. A PES policy network that meets Haas’s definition would then be termed an
‘epistemic community’ (see Zito 2001).
4. Although in the Colombian legal context the concept of market-based instruments by
then was not entirely new (see, for example, Decree 2811/1974 and Law 99/1993),
their actual implementation and operation were less frequent (Huber et al. 1998).
5. The National PES Strategy determines that implementation methodology should
contain at least the following elements: description of the environmental service;
geographic area where the project is carried out; description of current and desired
land uses and the impact of change in relation to the environmental service; determi-
nation of the environmental service providers; and the way in which changes in
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environmental services will be monitored (Minambiente 2008).

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