DSpace at VNU: Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam

Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Rural Studies
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Payments for environmental services and contested neoliberalisation
in developing countries: A case study from Vietnam
Pamela McElwee a, *, Tuyen Nghiem b, Hue Le b, Huong Vu b, Nghi Tran c
a

Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, USA
Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Viet Nam
c
Tropenbos International Vietnam, Hue, Viet Nam
b

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Available online 30 September 2014

Forest and water protection once relied primarily on regulatory means to achieve conservation ends, but
an explosion of market-based and neoliberal approaches to environmental policy now depend instead on
the creation and harnessing of financial instruments to value environmental goods and provide the
funding needed for their preservation. Payments for environmental services (PES), which provides incentives for soil, water and forest conservation from users of services to those who provide them, is one
of the most well-known of these approaches. However, many challenges remain for PES as a policy
approach, and this paper explores how PES schemes have been implemented in practice in developing

countries, how well they fit with descriptions of neoliberal environmental governance, and how these
policies are being shaped by rural actors to make them more favourable to social, cultural or economic
priorities in local areas. The paper shows that seemingly neoliberal policies like PES are actually a mix of
both market economic incentives and regulatory approaches, and thus should not be labelled solely
“neoliberal” per se. Further, much of this variegation in PES policy has resulted from active engagement
of rural actors in shaping the parameters of what parts of neoliberal policy are acceptable, and what are
not, and data from a Vietnam case study emphasize this point. Finally, the paper shows how key goals of
neoliberal approaches, namely efficiency and conditionality, are often actually the weakest components
of PES schemes, in Vietnam and elsewhere, particularly when they clash with local concerns over equity,
which should pose a rethinking of how to understand PES success. The article concludes that PES plans
should not be considered exclusively neoliberal per se, as they may in fact strengthen both state regulation and local participation and involvement in rural environmental management at the same time.
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Payments for environmental services
Forestry
Markets
Neoliberalism
Conservation
Ecosystem services

1. Introduction
Environmental protection measures once relied primarily on
state-led regulatory means to achieve conservation ends, but an
explosion of new policies now depend instead on decentralized,
often privatized, approaches to valuing environmental goods and
providing the capital needed for their preservation. Often labelled
as “neoliberal” or “market-based” forms of environmental governance, these policies range widely in focus and scope, but share in
common a goal of using economic incentives (either for positive
environmental services like habitat preservation or for negative

environmental externalities like pollution) in the hopes that the
market provides a more efficient, less expensive policy outcome.

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: (P. McElwee).
/>0743-0167/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Payments for environmental services (PES), which provides funding from users of ecosystem services to those who provide them, is
one of the more prominent and widespread of these market-based
policies.
While PES as a conservation tool has a long history in rural areas
in developed countries (such as the Conservation Reserve program
in the US, the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, or similar
environmental stewardship plans in Australia and New Zealand),
PES approaches have only more recently expanded into poorer
developing countries of the global South. On the one hand, this
expansion has prompted some amount of concern that these rural
poor could be unduly harmed by neoliberal market-based policies,
which might exclude access to resources or induce unwanted
commoditization in communities that are not prepared for such
approaches (Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; McAfee, 2012a; Redford and
Adams, 2009). On the other hand, rural farmers and other actors in
developing countries often have active ability to protest against,


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P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

influence and otherwise modify policy implementation to better

improve local outcomes, and have actively done so for many years,
including market-based and neoliberal policies like PES (McAfee
and Shapiro-Garza, 2010; Ostrom and Basurto, 2010). Thus, there
is an important need to understand how PES schemes have been
implemented in practice in developing countries and how well they
fit with descriptions of neoliberal environmental governance, and
how these policies are being shaped by rural actors to make them
more favourable to social, cultural or economic priorities in local
areas. This paper is aimed at both of these goals, and contributes to
the growing literature on PES by: 1) reviewing overall PES policies
in the global South, and concluding that most cannot be described
as true markets or clearly neoliberal policies; and 2) asserting that
one major reason why PES projects have been unable to function as
strict market instruments is due to the strong influence of participants, who often place high priority on non-market values like
equity and justice in their involvement with PES, and who have
been successful in many instances in changing PES projects to
better reflect these values.
In this paper, data and research from Vietnam, as well as a
survey of the literature from other developing countries, is used
to identify several key themes in how PES has been implemented
and how outcomes have been shaped, paying particular attention
to what we have identified as the “contested” nature of neoliberalism. First, the paper briefly reviews the existing research on
PES in the global South through examination of how PES instruments have developed, who is involved, how payments are
transferred and used, and what the known impacts have been.
This review shows that seemingly neoliberal policies like PES are
actually a mix of both market economic incentives and regulatory
approaches, and thus should not be labelled solely “neoliberal”
per se. Secondly, much of this variegation in PES policy has
resulted from active engagement of rural actors in shaping the
parameters of what parts of neoliberal policy are acceptable, and

what are not. Data from both reviews of the existing literature
and the Vietnam case study emphasize this point. Thirdly, the
paper shows how a key goal of neoliberal approaches, namely
market-led efficiency in the allocation of resources, is often
actually the weakest components of PES schemes, in Vietnam and
elsewhere, particularly when efficiency clashes with local concerns over equity, which should pose a rethinking of how to understand PES success. The article concludes that PES plans should
not be considered exclusively neoliberal per se, as they may in
fact strengthen both state regulation and local participation and
involvement in rural environmental management at the same
time. That is, not only are PES schemes not clearly neoliberal, but
active community and government involvement has strongly
influenced this outcome. Given this, more attention should be
paid to moving PES studies towards acknowledging the contingent, contested, and often complicated structures and outcomes
of so-called neoliberal approaches.
2. Background: neoliberalism and PES in rural areas of the
developing world
Studies of the impact of neoliberal processes on environmental
management have rapidly expanded in fields such as geography,
anthropology and rural sociology in recent years. Originating in
concerns over global structural adjustment programs and debt
repayment policies that began to be implemented during the 1980s
and 1990s, scholars have documented negative impacts on land
use, labour, food security, and health from these policies (Cupples,
2004; Gueorguieva and Bolt, 2003; Mazur, 2004). Neoliberal processes have since been theorized to encompass far more than
simple market expansionism, and David Harvey's identification of

neoliberalism as “accumulation by dispossession” is one of the
most well-known (Harvey, 2010). In Harvey's view, neoliberalism
involves a series of steps, all of which are fundamental for the
accumulation of capital in a global system. These include privatization of public goods, whether these are social safety nets or

environmental commons; financialization of everything, particularly inasmuch as speculative trading can be facilitated; and a
hollowing out of state institutions such that the state becomes a
handmaiden for capitalism and the facilitator of increasing income
transfers to the very wealthy (Harvey, 2007; Ortner, 2011).
Despite this broad definition, some commonalities in the
neoliberalism literature specifically related to nature and environmental governance have emerged (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2013;
Bakker, 2010; Castree, 2010). So-called “neoliberal natures” have
been characterized as “as the increasing management of natural
resources and environmental issues through market-oriented arrangements, by off-loading rights and responsibilities to private
firms, civil society groups and individual citizens, with state power,
in its national and transnational incarnations, providing the rules
under which markets operate” (Pellizzoni, 2011, p. 796). This
expansion of voluntary, market, private or decentralized approaches to governance has resulted in a series of new environmental policies that have emerged and which have been labelled as
broadly ‘neoliberal’ (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006; Liverman and Vilas,
2006). These include emissions trading programs for pollution
(Stavins, 2003); incentive payments to farmers for refraining from
use of sensitive lands (NCEE, 2001); wetland mitigation banking
(Robertson, 2004); certification schemes for commodities, like
sustainable timber or seafood (Cashore et al., 2003; Humphreys,
2009; Konefal, 2013); and tradable permits and quotas for commodities such as fish (Mansfield, 2006; McCay, 2004).
At least three main areas of concern can be identified in the
neoliberal natures literature. First, there is concern over commodification, namely the expansion of capital into new commodities
that were previously unmarketed (like carbon or biodiversity) or
into areas that were once considered public goods (such as water)
(Brockington and Duffy, 2010; Igoe and Brockington, 2007).
Scholars have argued that this commodification has in turn has
extended territorialization of control over resources resulting in
loss of access, particularly for poorer peoples (Adams et al., 2013;
Büscher et al., 2012; Corson, 2011; Kosoy and Corbera, 2010).
Thus privatization of resources often follows commodification,

through alienation and new forms of control of resources, for
example through private land tenure rather than commons
(Mansfield, 2007a; McAfee, 2012a, 2012b). Finally, capitalization
and the ascendance of the private sector has been facilitated by
deregulation and retreat of the state as barriers to capital movement (Heynen et al., 2007; Heynen and Robbins, 2005), and a
subsequent loss of attention to Keynesian concerns over inequality
and redistribution (Fletcher, 2012). Much of this critique of
neoliberal environmental policy has been grounded in concerns
over the disproportionate impact of neoliberal policies on the poor,
namely increased inequality in pursuit of efficiency (Haglund, 2011;
Prudham, 2004).
With these concerns as backdrop, in the following sections, this
paper looks specifically at PES policies as a form of market-driven
environmental governance and surveys the ways in which these
may or may not fit the above definitions of neoliberalism; assesses
if the outcomes of existing PES schemes appear to be resulting in
inequality and accumulation as other neoliberal approaches have
been accused of; and looks at the ways in which PES may facilitate
spaces for local participation and pushback against neoliberalizing
tendencies. The paper then later uses specific data from a case
study of implementation of PES in Vietnam to further these
arguments.


P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

2.1. PES as neoliberal environmental policy?
PES is often pointed to as an example of neoliberal environmental
governance par excellence and is currently the most widespread
land conservation policy using market-based approaches. PES

developed from calls by many economists to value non-market
goods, following from the work of Pigou and Coase on transaction
costs, property rights and externalities (Baumol and Oates, 1971;
Coase, 1960; van Noordwijk et al., 2012); such policies would facilitate market exchange to value scarce resources in an efficient
manner (Hahn and Stavins, 1992). Interest in the expansion of
market mechanisms also dovetailed with new attention to
ecosystem services, emphasized by reports like the Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment, which identified a number of services that
 mez-Baggethun et al.,
were undervalued in national accounts (Go
2010; MEA, 2005; Tallis et al., 2008; TEEB, 2009). Using market
forces to generate conservation or ecosystem services payments was
to “translate external, non-market values of the environment into
real financial incentives for local actors to provide such services”
(Engel et al., 2008, p. 664). The fundamental premise was that it is
only a matter or economics, of getting the ‘prices right,’ to make
resource conservation work (McAfee, 2012a; Muradian et al., 2010).
PES schemes have rapidly expanded in size and scope across the
global South in the past 15 years, after having first evolved in
developed countries (Wunder et al., 2008; Wunder and WertzKanounnikoff, 2009). PES has now become so popular and ubiquitous that varied organizations from state governments representing a range of political spectrums, to large donors like the
World Bank, to conservation organizations like the World Wildlife
Fund and poverty-focused NGOs like Oxfam, have all lined up in
support of using the market to pay for environmental services (G.
Bennett et al., 2013; Kossoy and Guigon, 2012; Sandbrook et al.,
2013). An early definition of PES emphasized that these should be
voluntary economic transactions between buyers and sellers of a
well-defined environmental service in which some sort of provisioning was offered in exchange for some type of conditional
payment (Derissen and Latacz-Lohmann, 2013; Engel et al., 2008;
Wunder, 2005). However, subsequent research has shown that this
idealized definition is not commonly encountered in the real world,

and that there is striking variety in the scale and scope of projects
and policies that fall under the PES label (Muradian et al., 2010;
Pirard, 2012a; Vatn, 2010). A survey of the range of these manifold PES arrangements is outlined below.
The scale of PES polices varies dramatically across the global
South, with strong regional trends. Several countries have national
PES policies which apply to tens of thousands of participants and
have been running for a few years; the most well known of these are
in Costa Rica (Chomitz et al., 1999; Sanchez-Azofeifa et al., 2007),
Mexico (Corbera et al., 2009; Kosoy et al., 2008), Ecuador (Wunder
n, 2008), and China (J. Liu et al., 2008; Weyerhaeuser
and Alba
et al., 2005). Newer national-level programs are also emerging in
Brazil (Pokorny et al., 2012), South Africa (Turpie et al., 2008), and
Vietnam (McElwee, 2012; T. T. T. Pham et al., 2008; To et al., 2012).
The size of these national-scale projects varies widely; Mexico has
2.5 million hectares of land enrolled its Program of Payments for
Environmental Services (PSAB) program (FONAFIFO et al., 2012),
while China's Sloping Land Conversion Program has over 12 million
ha under contracts (M. T. Bennett, 2008; J. Xu et al., 2006) (see Table
1.). There are also an increasing number of smaller-scale PES plans,
often initiated by donors or conservation organizations, such as for
biodiversity or wildlife conservation (Clements et al., 2010; Milne
and Niesten, 2009; Sommerville et al., 2010a); watershed protection (Branca et al., 2011; Huang and Upadhyaya, 2007; Pirard,
2012b); or carbon sequestration (Boyd et al., 2007; Reynolds,
2012). Overall, Latin America has by far the largest number of PES

425

projects (Balvanera et al., 2012), followed by Asia, and finally Africa
with a limited number of PES projects, particularly at national levels

(G. Bennett et al., 2013; Egoh et al., 2012; Katoomba Group, 2009;
Ecosystem Marketplace, 2008).
Because many ecological provisioning services that are considered to be most valuable for human sustainability, such as water
regulatory services, biodiversity conservation, and carbon storage
are found predominantly in rural areas, PES projects have focused
on rural landscapes and natures (Zhang et al., 2007; Kroeger and
Casey, 2007). By far the most commonly encountered PES
schemes in developing countries are for watershed management
for water flow, quality, or flood control (Bond and Mayers, 2010;
Brauman et al., 2007; Brouwer et al., 2011; Huang et al., 2009;
Stanton et al., 2010). Forest protection for ecosystem services,
including water flow, but also encompassing biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration, comes in a close second (Madsen
et al., 2010). Other environmental services in the global South
include soil erosion control, such as in China's Desertification
Combating Program (C. Liu et al., 2013); energy production, such as
for hydropower generation in Costa Rica (Blackman and
Woodward, 2010); and wildlife conservation, such as protection
of birds in Cambodia and Bolivia (Asquith et al., 2008; Clements
et al., 2010). Agriculturally-based PES, such as promotion of
improved farming, has been included in several large-scale pro€ rner et al.,
grams, such as the Proambiente program in Brazil (Bo
2007) and the Sloping Land Conversion Program in China (Yin
and Zhao, 2012), but attention to services from agricultural landscapes appears less frequently than it does in developed countries,
where such approaches are more common.
PES programs are very diverse in terms of users and suppliers,
and it is in these definitions that the first questions about whether
or not PES is ‘neoliberal’ can be asked. Because many rural residents
of developing countries who might be asked to conserve such
ecosystem functions are often relatively poor, PES policies have
been promoted as a potential winewin to transfer money from

wealthier users of energy, water and food supplies (Rosa et al.,
2004); such development-oriented objectives for PES do not
closely fit with the more capital-oriented objectives of many
neoliberal policies. There are a fair number of PES projects that are
aimed at direct users, like water-consuming businesses and
households, whereby national or subnational authorities serve as
intermediaries to coordinate the transfer of user fees to service
supplying households, as is the case in some of the Mexico programs (Goldman-Benner et al., 2012). But a great many PES projects
have not focused on privatized buyers and sellers per se; indeed, for
many large scale national projects, users/buyers are often taxpayers
in general. Some of these projects are therefore not technically
voluntary, as they involve mandatory use of general taxes, rents, or
user fees on all citizens (Pagiola et al., 2010b), thus making PES
more akin to regulatory approaches than a true market mechanism.
Many donor-supported PES projects also involve the transfer of
funding and resources to service providers and do not involve
direct ‘users’ of these services at all (T. T. T. Pham et al., 2010;
Sommerville et al., 2010b). Thus, in the vast majority of existing
PES schemes in developing countries, there remain significant roles
for national and subnational governmental intermediaries, in
addition to donors and NGOs, which is not an outcome typically
associated with ‘neoliberal’ policies (Vatn, 2010).
Suppliers also range widely, including those that are truly
voluntary, as is the case in Costa Rica where land-owners volunteer
for the Pago por Servicios Ambientales project (Steed, 2007). There
are as well more compulsory PES approaches, where all residents in
a given area are required to undertake some conservation action in
return for support, as is the case in the Sloping Land Conversion
Program in China (M. T. Bennett, 2008). There is also variation in the

426

P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

Table 1
Examples of payment types and levels across developing country PES experiences.
Country

Name of program

Costa Rica Pago por Servicios
Ambimentales (PSA)

Scope

Ecosystem service
targeted

Buyers/sellers

Payment levels

Market-based?

~800,000 ha

Forest cover

B:Government

S: Landowning households;
indigneous communities;
legal entities

~ US$64 to 80/ha for forest
protection; ~US$200-300/ha
for reforestation

No: funded primarily
by fuel tax surcharge
and donors; a few private
transactions with
hydropower companies
No: funded by national
water fees, government
budget transfers and donors

Mexico

Program of Payments ~2.5 mill ha
for Environmental
Services (PSAB)

US$27 and up/ha for
individuals; more for
communities

Ecuador

Socio Bosque

US$30 and below/ha

China

“Grain for Green”/
Sloping Land
Conversion Program
Payments for Forest
Environmental
Services (PFES)

Vietnam

Primarily
B:Government
degraded watershed (state forest agency)
S: Landholders
(individuals & communities)
868,000 ha
Forest cover; high
B:Government
altitude grasslands
S: Rural households or
communities
12 million ha Sloping cropland
B: Government
conversion to forest S: Rural households
4 million ha

Forest cover

No: funded by government
budget transfers

US$20e40 equiv/ha, up to
No: funded by government
max of $600/ha in watersheds budget transfers

US$20 and below/ha
B: State-owned electricity,
water and tourism companies
S: Households, communities &
government landowners

No: funded by mandatory
payment levels on public
water and energy use

n-Cascante, & Miranda, 2013;
Sources: (Corbera, Kosoy, & Tuna, 2007b; de Koning et al., 2011; FONAFIFO, CONAFOR, Ministry of Environment (2012); Porras, Barton, Chaco
Wunder et al., 2008; Yin and Zhao, 2012).

type of people who enrol as suppliers of services. While an original
Coasean-type market policy would have emphasized secure property rights as a precondition for suppliers to enter a PES market
(Muradian et al., 2010, p. 1203), the real world shows a mix of
property conditions in PES participation. In some places lack of
property rights and tenure has been a barrier to participation
(Bremer et al., 2014), while in other schemes suppliers of PES do not
necessarily have to have firm property rights, or even individual

ones. For example, there are cases of PES being implemented on
public lands and with communities who do not yet have secure land
titles, although these do present special challenges (Mahanty et al.,
2013). Overall the literature does seem to emphasize however that
particularly in cases of voluntary PES, larger and wealthier landowners tend to be the ones with higher rates of participation
(Zbinden and Lee, 2005).1 Poorer households in general appear to be
less active in PES, due to higher transaction costs, less labour, less
capital and less capacity, among other reasons (Dougill et al., 2012;
Hegde and Bull, 2011; Jindal et al., 2012; Landell-Mills and Porras,
2002; Pokorny et al., 2012). This has led some national PES programs
to use more explicit social or environmental targeting criteria for
PES participation, such as in Costa Rica where indigenous communities and female landowners are now favoured (Porras et al.,
2013b).
The payments themselves that are used in many PES project
range in both size and kind (Adhikari and Boag, 2013; Pattanayak
et al., 2010). Overall, there are very few instances of direct market
mechanisms that set variable prices for PES schemes in developing
countries (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012; McElwee, 2012; Pirard,
2012a; Prasetyo et al., 2009; Shapiro-Garza, 2013a). Instead, most
PES payments in the global South are determined by local or national laws, and in this we see an additional departure from orthodox neoliberalism (Adhikari and Boag, 2013; Ferraro et al., 2012;
 mez-Baggethun and Barton, 2013). As evidenced in Table 1, many
Go

1
Researchers also continue to study whether PES can enhance participants' access to land tenure (e.g. by forming financial means to establish secure claims)
(Bremer et al., 2014; Porras et al., 2013). Reviews on this question are mixed; some
studies assert that forest tenure has been enhanced through participation in PES
programs (Lawlor et al., 2013) while other reports are inconclusive on this question
(Awono et al., 2014; Corbera et al., 2007b; Duchelle et al., 2014; Resosudarmo et al.,
2014; Sunderlin et al., 2014).

national-level PES policies require central government transfers, or
other forms of state support, to make payments to participating
households; sources for such central government transfers include
fuel taxes and obligatory water and energy fees. Many payment
levels are set somewhat arbitrarily in developing country PES
programs, often dependent on academic studies of opportunity
costs or willingness to pay, hydrological flows, or other criteria
(Balvanera et al., 2012; Porras et al., 2013b). There are only a handful
of PES projects in developing countries that use actual market
mechanisms, like auctions, to set PES pricing (Ajayi et al., 2012;
Jindal et al., 2013), unlike many developed countries where such
markets are more common.
There have been few studies that have tried to compare the
relative lessons and successes from different types and forms of PES
payments, so this is still an area of on-going research (Adhikari and
Agrawal, 2013; Mahanty et al., 2013; Mayrand and Paquin, 2005;
Tacconi et al., 2013). Total payments in individual case studies
have ranged on the order of a few dollars per household per year to
as much as thousands of dollars, often dependent on land size
(FONAFIFO et al., 2012; Mahanty et al., 2013). There are also many
cases of PES being paid to communities rather than households, but
there is no clear evidence that one method is better than another
(Reynolds, 2012; Tacconi et al., 2013). There are also PES projects
that do not make use of cash payments for participation, but rather
provide other types of compensation and rewards (van Noordwijk
and Leimona, 2010). Examples include the Socio Bosque program
in Ecuador, which requires participants to provide investment
plans for PES funds, including in local health and community initiatives (de Koning et al., 2011), or other projects that invest in local
infrastructure and irrigation for participating communities (Tacconi

et al., 2013). Agroforestry inputs, tree seedlings, and technical
extension are other common incentives in non-cash PES plans, and
such support for often non-capitalist subsistence production is
another departure from orthodox neoliberal policy. Greiner and
Stanley (2013) have pointed out that additional co-benefits are an
important part of PES, such as the development of social capital and
psychological benefits from participation (Asquith et al., 2008;
Garbach et al., 2012; Nkhata and Mosimane, 2012; van Noordwijk
and Leimona, 2010). There is increasing recognition that only
paying attention to pricing mechanisms for ecosystem services in
the absence of cultural and social factors is inadequate, and co-


P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

benefits, as opposed to only cash payments, may be one way to
shape PES towards local norms (Muradian et al., 2013; Van Hecken
and Bastiaensen, 2010; Vatn, 2010).
Once payments are made, what do participating suppliers in PES
projects actually do, or spend their payments on? PES projects can
be broadly characterized as falling under either “use-restricting” or
“asset-enhancing” approaches (Wunder, 2007): “use-restricting”
PES would pay participants to not do something, such as convert
forests to agriculture, or hunt wildlife (Milne and Adams, 2012),
while “asset-enhancing” would instead focus on active management, such as in reforestation or clearing of invasive species (van
Noordwijk et al., 2012; Wunder, 2005). Asset-enhancing PES projects appear to have made more positive impacts than userestricting approaches, as policing negative behaviour is more
difficult to implement and imposes costs on households (Pirard
et al., 2010). A commonly reported outcome has been that PES has
not made much of a difference in land use, while in some places land
use change has happened but has been modest (Alix-Garcia et al.,

2012; Arriagada et al., 2012; Hayes, 2012; Robalino and Pfaff, 2013;
Scullion et al., 2011). In a review of 26 PES cases, Adhikari and
Agrawal (2013) assert that environmental outcomes have generally outweighed the social outcomes. In other cases, PES may simply
fail to induce paid-for conservation actions; many PES projects
report problems with conditionality (e.g. payments only being made
for actual conservation actions) in that providers of services are not
strictly monitored to make sure they are providing the paid-for action, and there is little repercussion if negative actions, such as
deforestation, do occur (Brouwer et al., 2011; Daniels et al., 2010;
Minang and van Noordwijk, 2012; Pattanayak et al., 2010; Porras
et al., 2013a; van Noordwijk et al., 2012). Many times people may
not even know they are participating in PES (Neitzel et al., 2014). In
other cases, PES payments have simply not been as lucrative as more
destructive uses like logging or cash crop agriculture (Gene, 2007;
Hayes, 2012; Pirard, 2012b; Sierra and Russman, 2006).
2.2. Outcomes of PES: inequality, privatization and accumulation,
or not?
Regardless of whether or not we consider PES as truly ‘neoliberal’
or not, to what degree have PES schemes been able to avoid the
negative outcomes associated with neoliberalism, such as increasing
inequality and accumulation of land by the wealthier through
alienation and privatization? The literature on outcomes of PES in
developing countries is mixed, which accounts for the fact that early
enthusiasm for PES as a winewin for conservation and development
has given way to more realistic expectations. Recent work shows PES
are expensive to set up (Uchida et al., 2005) and have high transaction costs (Alston et al., 2013); conflicts over the societal value of
ecosystem services are often hard to resolve (Clements et al., 2010;
Kari and Korhonen-Kurki, 2013); and PES projects simply may fail
to reach people responsible for degradation of environmental services (Brouwer et al., 2011; Minang and van Noordwijk, 2012). Many
questions also remain about how effective and efficient PES can be in
achieving poverty alleviation as compared to other long-tested approaches, like conditional cash transfers (Grieg-Gran et al., 2005;

Milder et al., 2010; Rodríguez et al., 2011; Rosa et al., 2004;
Tschakert, 2007; Wunder, 2008). These and other issues have
raised questions about whether PES is being promoted too heavily as
a solution to what are very disparate conservation problems
(Muradian et al., 2013). A recent review noted that despite a voluminous literature, no analysis has yet conclusively answered, “Does
PES work better than no PES intervention in delivering environmental services?” (Pattanayak et al., 2010).
On the question of income accumulation and inequality that
may result from market-based conservation policy, there is not yet

427

a systematic understanding of the factors that influence active
participation in PES, including eligibility, desire, and ability, which
might help explain uneven participation outcomes (Arriagada et al.,
2009; Gong et al., 2010; Melo et al., 2014; Pagiola et al., 2005). Many
case studies have primarily looked at whether individual PES
payments covered opportunity costs for participants (such as in
foregone agricultural production) and have not directly addressed
inequality issues per se (Bulte et al., 2008; de Koning et al., 2011;
Gauvin et al., 2009; Gross-Camp et al., 2012; Mahanty et al.,
2013; Pagiola et al., 2010a, 2008). Increases in household income
without income stratification are reported in some comparative
studies where households have received payments (Tacconi et al.,
2013), while in other cases, benefits have been mixed. A number
of PES projects have reported low participation rates and consequently unequal benefit distribution (Adhikari, 2009; Clements
et al., 2013; Schomers and Matzdorf, 2013). In some reported PES
schemes, long contract times, especially for services like carbon,
were not clearly understood by participants and might cause future
problems with issues like land inheritance (Tacconi et al., 2013).
There have been few studies that have tried to compare the

relative lessons and successes at the household level from different
types and forms of PES payments (Mayrand and Paquin, 2005). In
some reported cases, cash income may increase due to payments, but
agricultural production may decline when required land changes are
made, leading to no net benefit or even losses; for example, Yang
et al. (2013) report that households in China's Sloping Land Conversion Program faced forest restrictions and crop losses to wildlife
that were not compensated for sufficiently by the overall size of
payments. In tree planting projects for carbon, some studies report
positive household incomes (for example, converting agricultural
lands to forest freed household labourers for other activities,
including migrant wage labour (W. Xu et al., 2007)), although other
studies report that PES benefits were often captured by better off
households, larger landowners, or well-connected industries
€rner et al., 2010; Corbera and Brown, 2010; Lansing, 2013;
(Bo
Zbinden and Lee, 2005). In some PES studies, net negative results,
such as restrictions on forest use (e.g. no fuelwood collection) and
declining household food security and income, have been documented (Beymer-Farris and Bassett, 2012; Ibarra et al., 2011; Liang
and Mol, 2013; Osborne, 2011), as well as community conflict between PES receivers and non-receivers (Rodríguez de Francisco et al.,
2013; Tacconi et al., 2013). In these cases, conservation restrictions
that have been required to receive PES payments have resulted in
clear trade-offs that have fallen hardest on the poor and women
(Boyd, 2002; Kerr, 2002). The evidence that PES has resulted in
increased restrictions on access to previously public resources, or
that there has been an expansion of privatizing tendencies among
resources now valued by PES, is also mixed. In one analysis of Mexico's PES programs, Osborne (2013) notes that mapping and privatization of once-common ejidos was observed, but how much of this
privatization was attributable to PES projects alone and how much to
overall trends towards ejido privatization is not clear.
A final question concerns how local participants have been able
to avoid negative outcomes of inequality and accumulation through

their active shaping of PES implementation; in other words, how
originally neoliberal goals may have been shaped by local actors to
fit with local objectives and concerns (Higgins et al., 2012). The
evidence on this from developing countries is incomplete, but some
case studies do show that active involvement, particularly from
peasant and indigenous communities and organizations, have succeeded in shaping PES programs toward social objectives. Studies of
how participants in PES have been able to shape these programs to
better reflect their needs, such as through agrarian organizing, is an
important area of growing research (Shapiro-Garza, 2013b). The
importance of intermediaries in facilitating access to PES schemes


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has been noted (Bosselmann and Lund, 2013; T. T. T. Pham et al.,
2010) and these organizations may also play important roles in
enabling communities to retain voice and input into policy implementation. Key areas where beneficiaries have been able to shape
PES implementation include: the spatial scope of such projects (e.g.
lobbying for expanded coverage of PES programs (Shapiro-Garza,
2013a) or forest carbon project participation (Reynolds, 2012)); in
the size and timing of payments (Narloch et al., 2011; Pirard, 2012b);
in the types of payments that are acceptable, including shifting some
PES schemes away from cash payments to more socially acceptable
ideas of compensation, rewards and incentives (Gross-Camp et al.,
2012; Swallow et al., 2007); and in using PES participation to
leverage other social goods, such as more secure land tenure
(Osborne, 2011). Refocusing policy-scale objectives to include more
development-oriented goals and reduced emphasis on environmental outcomes has also been seen in some national level programs, such as in Mexico, where Shapiro-Garza notes that the PES

program “has been hybridized through multiple sites of articulation
and contestation to become a federal subsidy for rural poverty
alleviation” (Shapiro-Garza, 2013a, p. 5). Such outcomes are not
surprising, given that many authors have noted the widely variable
results of other neoliberal policies (Brenner et al., 2010; Mansfield,
2004; Peck and Tickell, 2002).
Given these international experiences that indicate there is a
continuum of what we might term “degrees of neoliberalism and
marketization” in PES plans, and that these projects vary in their
ability to adequately involve households and improve environmental management, and further that there are indications of
important roles for local actors in helping shape PES policy at both
local and even national levels, we set out to explore these issues
through a case study in Vietnam. Vietnam is a recent entrant into
the PES implementation debate, and provides a useful setting to
explore major issues surrounding how neoliberal (or not) PES
schemes are; how households engage with them; and how these
local actors might successfully shape the overall contours of PES
policy based on local values of equity and justice, rather than the
market-led value of efficiency. Vietnam was selected as a case study
because of the relatively recent implementation of a nation-wide
PES policy, which has allowed us to research the roll-out from the
very beginning of the process, and because PES laws in Vietnam
explicitly acknowledge the importance of poverty reduction for
households as an important goal of these schemes. This has allowed
us to analyse if goals for household involvement and benefits are
effectively addressed by the country's approach to PES.
3. PES in Vietnam as a case study
PES has rapidly gained popularity as an environmental governance strategy in Vietnam in the past decade. First introduced by
several small donor-supported campaigns in the mid-2000s
(Leimona et al., 2008; Minh et al., 2008; Peters, 2008), these projects introduced the idea that upland forest communities could be

paid to protect watersheds for downstream water users. In 2007,
the national Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development
(MARD) led a process to design and formulate an official PES policy
for Vietnam, including a detailed review of international PES experiences (for example, a visit to Vietnam by officials from Costa
Rica's well-known program was sponsored as part of this process).
The Prime Minister approved Decision No. 380 QD-TTG in 2008,
titled “On The Pilot Policy On Forest Environment Service Charge
Payment,” and PES was also included as part of a Biodiversity Law
that passed in 2008. These decisions set up two PES pilot projects,
in Lam Dong and Son La provinces in the south and north of the
country respectively, on a two-year basis, to be replicated elsewhere in the future if successful. In Lam Dong province, the pilot

primarily linked hydropower plants and water users in other
provinces, such as urban areas of southern Vietnam, to households
living in an upland watershed, while the Son La pilot linked hydropower companies of the northern mountains to communities
and households in that watershed. As in other countries, PES was
proposed as a winewin solution for a myriad of conservation
challenges, including deforestation, the need for increased participation of local people in forest protection, concerns over headwater and downstream water supplies, and biodiversity generally
(McElwee, 2012) (see Fig. 1).
The two state-sponsored pilots were considered to be successes in
their brief trial run, and in 2010, a new national policy was passed,
titled Decision 99 ND-CP, “On the Policy for Payment for Forest
Environmental Services.” Decision 99 says that “Organizations and
individuals benefiting from forest environmental services must pay
for forest environmental services” and indicates that five types of
forest PES payments are legal: 1) payments for land protection, such
as soil erosion; 2) payments for watershed protection and water
regulation; 3) carbon sequestration payments; 4) landscape and
biodiversity protection payments for tourism purposes; and 5) payments to protect the spawning grounds and source of seed for
aquaculture (MARD, 2010). The decree indicates that some PES fees

will be mandatory, and that required buyers will include hydropower
companies, water companies, industrial facilities that use water,
tourist companies, and others to be determined. Both direct user to
seller contracts and indirect ones between sellers and intermediaries
are allowed; in indirect cases, payments will go to a Forest Protection
and Development Fund to be set up in each province and payments
will be transmitted via these provincial funds to recipients.
The expressed hope for Decree 99 is that it will enable the
funding of forest conservation activities without the need for central
government transfers; an official in charge of forest administration
noted in a meeting in late 2011 that MARD hopes to only supply
around 25% of the budget for forest management to lower level state
entities (national parks, forest reserves, logging companies) in the
future, and the remaining 75% of budgets will have to be raised by
these local organs through creative means like PES, entrance fees, or
other approaches (personal communication, Nguyen Ba Ngai, 2011).
A number of donor-funded smaller-scale PES and PES-type projects
(at least 13 in 2014) also are currently operating in individual
provinces, usually involving donor financial transfers rather than
true user-funded PES (T. T. T. Pham et al., 2010, 2009). The sponsors
of these projects include conservation organizations like the World
Wildlife Fund, poverty alleviation organizations like Care International, and bilateral and multilateral donors such as JICA, GTZ and
the Asian Development Bank (T. T. Pham et al., 2013).
3.1. Methods
Since 2011, the authors have been carrying out research in
several of the provinces that have PES or PES-like programs,
including the two initial pilot provinces of Lam Dong and Son La.
From 2011 to 2014, we have regularly visited the two initial PES
pilot sites and carried out a mixed methods approach to collecting
social and environmental data. In this article we discuss our work in

Lam Dong and Son La, where we chose two districts in which PES
has been carried out, selected 5 villages that have been involved,
and interviewed a total of 151 households (representing some
600 þ individuals) in these selected villages in fall 2011, with
follow-up qualitative interviews in 2013 and 2014 (see Table 2).2

2
Households were selected at random from a village census; households are
usually the main units making land-use and livelihood decisions, and this project
has used the standard Vietnamese government definition of households.


P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

429

Fig. 1. Billboard advertising PES projects in Lam Dong, Vietnam.

The standardized survey assessed local livelihoods, such as
household membership, labour allocation, ethnicity, migration,
patterns of income and expenditures, agricultural characteristics,
type and scale of land holdings and tenure regimes, and role that
natural resource use plays in the household. We also assessed levels
of participation in PES and how PES income was used within the
household. We carried out focus groups with smaller numbers of
local residents in each village, including forest users, women, and
poor households.
We conducted interviews with government officials and policymakers in each field site to gather information on the development of general forest policies as well as local PES implementation;
interviewed stakeholders included Provincial, District and
Commune Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Offices;

Provincial, District and Commune Ministry of Natural Resources
and Environment Offices; Provincial and District Forest Protection
Departments; Provincial Funds for the collection of PES money;
Forest Protection Management Boards; management staff of two
protected areas (Bi Duop in Lam Dong and Copia in Son La); officials
of companies paying environmental service fees, such as hydropower companies, water supply companies and tourism

Table 2
Comparison of two pilot PES provinces in Vietnam.
Indicator

Lam Dong province
(south)

Son La province (north)

Dominant forest
type

Pine forest, deciduous
broadleaved forest

% Forest Cover
(Natural)
% Forest Cover
(Plantation)
Deforestation/
afforestation rates,
2000-2005
Ethnic composition

54%

Mixed coniferous-broadleaved
forest on limestone, with
significant bamboo
35%

4%

2%

À4.8%

þ3.3%

22% ethnic minority
(Koho, Chil, Mnong)
32%
~8000

83% ethnic minority (Thai,
Hmong, Tay, Dao)
53%
~52,000

Poverty rates
Total HH receiving
PES payments
in 2011

Land tenure
situation

3% of forest estate held ~80% of forest estate held
by HH & communities by HH, user groups &
communities

Source: Provincial statistics and interviews, 2011e2012.

companies; and NGOs and civil society organizations involved in
PES. In total more than 50 stakeholder interviews were carried out.
Research sites (Fig. 2): Lam Dong is a mountainous province
located in the southeast of the Central Highlands region, approximately 300 km from the major urban area of Ho Chi Minh City, with
a total provincial population of 1,198,261. Situated around
800e1000 m asl, Lam Dong's economy is primarily from agriculture,
forestry and fishing (49%), services (32%) and industry (20%). The
province has 255,400 ha usable for agriculture, and about half the
province is composed of sloping land above 25 . High economic
value crops such as coffee, tea and mulberry predominate, and
around Da Lat city (the provincial capital), vegetable and flower
plantations grown in greenhouses have spread rapidly. Forest cover
is reported at around 54%, with more than 345,003 ha of production
forest for timber (57% of the total), protection forests for watersheds
(172,800 ha, 29% of forest area), and special-use forests for biodiversity and tourism (83,674 ha, 14% of forest area). Most all of these
forests are under some form of state management, such as in national parks and nature reserves, forest watershed protection
boards, and state logging companies. Household ownership of forests is very low in Lam Dong, around 3% of the forest estate; instead,
households can participate in “forest contracting” as a model of comanagement, whereby state forest owners contract on a yearly basis
with individual households to provide protection services in return
for a set payment. These contracts were begun in the late 1990s, and
in 2004, 301,836 ha of forest were under these types of contracts for

protection (Nguyen, 2011). These protection contracts have since
transitioned to being PES contracts since 2009. Despite these policies for protection, natural forests in Lam Dong continued to decline
by around 5% from 2000 to 2008, and according to officials in the
province, the main drivers of deforestation have been over-logging
activities by state-owned companies; the expansion of cash crops
like coffee, rubber and cashew; free migration by people from other
provinces to claim land illegally; forest fires, either accidental or
arson; and illegal logging (Nguyen, 2011).
Son La is also a mountainous province, located in the Northwest
Mountainous region, 320 km distant from the capital city of Hanoi,
with a population of 1,083,700. The terrain of the province is very
complex, heavily dissected by valleys and with steep slopes,
limiting arable land, with an average height of 600e700 m asl. Wet
rice is grown in valleys with coffee, tea and fruit crops planted on
nearby slopes, with some cattle raising as well. The province has a
total of 588,763 ha of forested land (around 35% of the land area),
including 184,118 ha of production forest (31% of forests),


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P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

Fig. 2. Regions and provinces in Vietnam where field work on PES was conducted.

356,996 ha of watershed protection forest (61% of forest area), and
47,649 ha of special-use forests (8% of forest area). Over 97% of Son
La's natural area belongs to the watershed of the Da and Ma Rivers,
and protection forests play an extremely important role in the
prevention of erosion, landslides and flash floods, and contributes

to the regulation of the water levels of two very large downstream
hydropower plants, the Son La and Hoa Binh dams. Deforestation
has slowed in this province, primarily due to limited high quality
forest areas (thereby reducing the number of problems of illegal
logging), and forest cover actually expanded since 2000 due to
active afforestation projects. Most instances of continued deforestation are a result of agricultural expansion (such as coffee) or loss
of forests due to hydropower reservoir development.
3.2. Implementation of the PES pilot projects
The two PES pilot provinces now have several years of data on
implementation; users have already been assessed payment fees,

and service providing households have been paid several times.
Both pilots had to undertake a series of measures in order to get off
the ground, including: identifying the ecosystem services; identifying the service payees; identifying the value of the services and
payment rates; and identifying who the paid service providers
would be. In both sites, provincial officials decided to focus on
hydrological services and soil protection, although some attention
was also paid to amenity values of forests. Other environmental
services, like biodiversity, were judged to be too difficult to
compensate directly and therefore were simply to be implied cobenefits from preservation of forest cover. Local ecosystem services were assessed by hired consultants from a USAID-funded
project in Lam Dong; one study used the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model developed in the US to estimate the
approximate costs of soil erosion and water runoff in deforested
lands upstream from a hydroelectric plant, while an economist
conducted a willingness to pay study among water users in urban
areas of Ho Chi Minh City (ARBCP, 2009; V. A. Pham, 2009). From
these two reports, a fee structure for both areas was suggested and
adopted by MARD officials: buyers were to be assessed 20 VND/
kWh (US$0.0013/kWh) generated from hydroelectric plants and
40VND/m3 (US$0.0025/m3) from water consumed in participating
urban areas. (These uniform rates were later adopted for all of the

country in Decree 99). Tourism companies depending on some sort
of environmental service were also to be assessed 1e2% of their
total related revenues.
Buyers of environmental services were identified in both sites.
In the Lam Dong pilot area, the downstream Water Supply Company of Ho Chi Minh City (SAWACO) and the water supply company
of Bien Hoa City; two hydropower plants (Da Nhim, capacity of
160 MW, and Dai Ninh, capacity of 300 MW); and five state-owned
tourism companies using forest environmental services to generate
revenue (e.g. trekking companies, waterfall tours) were identified
as dependent on ecosystem services for their economic operations.
In Son La province, the payees included the massive Hoa Binh hydroelectric system (capacity 1900 MW) that supplies electricity to
much of northern Vietnam, as well as a much smaller hydropower
system (Suoi Sap, capacity 14 MW) and several water supply
companies. All of these entities were required to pay into a new
Provincial Forest Protection Fund managed by local agricultural
departments. During the pilot period, fees collected totalled nearly
$5 million US in Lam Dong and nearly $3 million US in Son La (see
Table 3).
The large majority of the fees have come from the hydropower
plants, with urban water user fees a much smaller contribution.
Tourism revenue has been practically negligible, with only a few
dollars assessed to a few companies based on 1% of ticket prices,
usually around $1 per visit to lakes or forested areas around Da Lat
city in Lam Dong province. Most companies that have paid PES fees
have stated that they will be passing their additional costs onto
their customers by raising the price of electricity or water. However,
one issue that has arisen in the Son La pilot is that several mandated
users did not pay fees for several years, using several excuses,
including that the fees were too high, the national electricity
company had not been given permission to pass costs onto consumers yet, and that hydropower companies that report financial

losses should not have to pay PES fees (Hess and T. T. H. To, 2011).
3.3. Participation in the pilots
In both sites, the majority of local “service suppliers” are ethnic
minorities, including Koho, Chil and Mnong communities in Lam
Dong, and Thai, Dao and Hmong communities in Son La, although
each pilot has a rather different implementation structure due to
differences in land tenure arrangements in the two sites. In Lam


P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

431

Table 3
Fees collected in two pilot PES project provinces, 2009e2010.
Payer

Total payment

Rates based on

% Of total fund for
province

Lam Dong, (Southern Vietnam): 516,800 ha of forest under PES
Dai Ninh and Da Nhim Hydropower plants
4.6 million US (96 billion VND)
20 VND/kWh produced (US$0.0013/kWh)
89%
Water supply companies of Ho Chi Minh and Bien

519,000 US (10.9 billion VND)
40 VND/m3 supplied (US$0.0025/m3)
10%
Hoa cities
5 Tourism companies
28 US (0.6 million VND)
1% of profits
Less than 1%
Total
4.6 million USD (98.6 billion VND) paid to 13 state forest owners which transferred around 80% to ~8000 households
on yearly contracts
Son La (Northern Vietnam): 397,000 ha of forest under PES
Hoa Binh and Suoi Sap Hydroelectric companies
2.9 million US (62 billion VND)
20 VND/kWh produced(US$0.0013/kWh)
99%
Water supply company of Son La city
1600 US (34 million VND)
40 VND/m3 (US$0.0025/m3)
1%
Total
2.9 million USD (62.3 billion VND) transferred to 52,000 forest owners (HH and communities)
Source: Provincial interviews, 2011. 1 USD ¼ 21,000 Vietnam Dong (VND) at time of research.

Dong province, most forests remain under state control and so this
province selected local households who sign protection contracts
with forest owners (the state). Individual households agree to
participate by patrolling state forest land and signing agreements
that they will not engage in deforestation, while state organizations
get to keep some money for administrative costs of administering

PES. For example, of the 2010 fees collected in Lam Dong province
($2.61 million US), 10% were kept by the provincial PES fund to
cover their expenses, 9% of the PES fees went to 13 large state forest
owners (such as the Bi Duop National Park) for management purposes to cover their costs, and the remaining 81% went to households who agreed to protect forests on yearly contracts. A total of
approximately 8000 households have participated in these contracts since the beginning of the pilot in Lam Dong. State forest
agencies and forest owners targeted individual households and
communities for participation based on broad provincial criteria of
prioritizing poorer households and ethnic minorities. For example,
the Bi Duop National Park selected communities on the southern
boundary of its border to participate, and then let local community
leaders designate which households should be selected for PES
contracts, based on labour availability, income status, and enthusiasm for participation. Land tenure was not an issue in selection for
participation, since all the land under PES contracts still belongs to
Bi Duop National Park.
In Son La, most forests were allocated/privatized to households
and communities in the 1990s, and only small areas of forest remain
under direct state control. Therefore, in this province forest-owning
households contract directly to the PES provincial fund, which has
increased transaction costs considerably. 52,000 forest owners have
been paid from PES funds in Son La, of which 45,000 were individual
households, 6000 were communities or groups of households, and
1000 were other organizations (for example, the army), and 3500
officials in Son La are required to distribute all the PES payments to
these recipients (Loft et al., 2014). Participation largely has depended on awareness of the PES program among these land-owning
communities; the ability of provincial and district officials to enrol
people in these pilots; and in some cases where community leaders
decided to enrol community forests, some households reported that
they had had no choice whether to participate or not.
In our household survey, we asked respondents to list why they
were involved in PES projects (if they were doing so). Households

were free to choose from a list of multiple reasons, and two were
most often listed: to receive payments and to receive benefits from
better forest management (Table 4).
Not all households in eligible PES areas have participated in the
program, however. In Lam Dong, because selection of eligible
households was made by the state forest owner or local community
leaders, many of the PES contracts went only to those households
that had previously participated in other forest planting and

protection programs with local authorities, dating back to the early
1990s, leaving out those who were not already connected. Slightly
less than a quarter of our sample had reported not taking part in
protection projects (see Table 5), and discussions with authorities
confirmed that in some communities, between 10 and 30% of
people were not taking part in PES. When asked what the reasons
were for not having participated, most common reason given was
that the household had not been asked to participate by local authorities or by community members, either due to a lack of a PES
project nearby, or else the PES roster was already “full”. In no case
did a household respond that they were worried about restrictions
on forest use as a reason not to get involved in a forest protection
project. (Table 5)
During focus groups, we were able to elaborate further on these
findings. Some of those who were not participating in the PES
project in Lam Dong included older households who had insufficient labour to regularly patrol forests; female headed households
that had no male labourers, since forest protection was seen as a
male job; and households that were away from the area at certain
times of the year while doing migrant labour, as they were
considered unable to devote sufficient time for forest protection. In
Son La, poorer households with insufficient funds to reforest land
and young households who did not own forest land were most

often excluded from PES projects.
3.4. Contestation and alteration of the PES pilots
Despite the national policy that required a fixed level of assessed
PES fees for service buyers (namely 20 VND/kWh generated from
hydroelectric plants and 40VND/m3 from water companies), a national attempt to set similarly fixed levels of PES payments to service providers was strongly protested by households in both sites,
which succeeded in changing this policy. Decree 99 suggests a
tiered system of PES payments which would be dependent on
forest type and protection status; for example, one hectare of forest
Table 4
Reasons for participating in PES projects.
Reason

Lam Dong (n ¼ 39)

Son La (n ¼ 29)

To manage forests better for long
term benefits
To get payments
Feeling personal responsibility
Participating to get new information
and experience
Gain access to land rights
To improve social relations
Forced to participate

44%

62%

72%
33%
15%

14%
21%
72%

2%
2%
0%

0%
0%
24%

Source: HH survey, 2011. Only households participating in PES answered this
question in the survey.


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P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

Table 5
Reasons given for not having participated in PES.

Not being invited or selected to take part
No local forest patrol groups in this area
Want to participate but need more info

No financial conditions to participate
Do not think protection will have any results
Don't see any direct household benefits
from participation
No labour to participate
Worried about forest restrictions

Table 6
Average size of Forest Protection Payment Received per Household (HH).
Lam Dong
(n ¼ 74)

Son La
(n ¼ 76)

23
1
0
1
0
0

4
4
1
0
1
1

0

0

2
0

Average amount of PES
payment per HH
Minimum payment per HH
Maximum payment per HH in VND
Average area of protected forest
under PES contracts per HH
Minimum area under PES per HH
Maximum area under PES per HH

Lam Dong

Son La

8,919,307
VND (US$425)
0
39,200,000
37.2 ha

120,092
VND (US$7)
0
2,700,000
14.5 ha

2 ha
74 ha

0.10 ha
43 ha

(Source: Field survey, 2011).

(Source: Field survey, 2011).

in any given province would be compensated based on the total
amount of payments collected for the area (minus management
fees), divided by the total area protected, and multiplied by a special coefficient (called “Coefficient K”) that would reflect forest
quality and protection status (MARD, 2010). This use of “Coefficient
K” was an attempt to set some levels of conditionality on the PES
payments by linking them to broad categories of ecological type of
forest (called coefficient K1), function of forest (for production,
protection or special use) (K2), origin of forest (planted or natural)
(K3), and type of forest protection provided (K4) (ranging from
difficult to easy) (T. T. Pham et al., 2013).
However, using multiple K coefficients led to complicated calculations for local officials, as well as disparities in total payments for
different households. For Son La province, in the first year of the pilot,
lands classified as “natural” protection forest were assigned a coefficient (k ¼ 1), which meant that around US$7 per ha per year would
be paid, while plantation forest under protection would be (k ¼ 0.9),
equivalent to US$6.3 per ha per year, natural production forest would
be (k ¼ 0.6) with payment around US$4.2 per ha per year, and
plantation forest under active production would be assigned
(k ¼ 0.5), or US$3 per ha per year. In Lam Dong, similar coefficients
were considered in an attempt to reward higher amounts based on
quality of forest cover and degree of management.

However, as indicated in interviews and focus groups, local
households protested when they received these different payments
in the first year, as they did not understand why they might have
gotten less money than a neighbour for having invested the same
amount of time and labour in protection. Households that were
interviewed emphasized that their work in PES, particularly in Lam
Dong, was based on labour: they primarily went out to their contracted forest areas on set time schedules, walking around forest
edges once every week, and they often described their actions not
in terms of “protection” but in terms of “effort”. Just as jobs of
similar “effort” were paid similar wages in the open labour market,
households in PES projects wanted equal payments for similar labour. The unequal payments in the first year of the program
resulted in resentment and even vandalism toward those who were
benefiting (To et al., 2012).
The protests resulted in authorities scrapping the tiered
approach. Subsequently, in Lam Dong, payment rates were calculated in a simple fashion based on dividing the total PES funds
received each year by the number of participating households. In
2010, this amounted to around 280,000 VND (US$13)/ha in payment, and in 2011 it was 400,000 VND/ha (US$19/ha). In Son La, the
forest department decided in phase 2 that only one K-coefficient
was to be used, with a uniform payment of around US$ 6.8 per ha/
yr, which has been consistent across recent years. These uniform
payments now mean that every PES provider will get the exact
same level of payment for participating, regardless of amount of
carbon conserved or water regulated by different types of forests
and management strategies.

However, households do still get different total amounts of
payments because the contracts are based on total hectares protected. Participating households in Lam Dong are contracted to
protect over 30 ha per household on average (although these
households do not have land tenure rights to this land), while Son
La households are generally land owners with secure tenure but

very small holdings (under 5 ha/household on average, or in
community forests, small areas of less than 20 ha total). In both
areas, communities or small groups of households participated
together in patrolling and other forest protecting activities; in Lam
Dong, most cases PES payments have been directed at individual
households while in Son La both individual households and whole
communities received payments (55% of survey respondents
participated as individual households, while the rest reported
having participated as part of a group).
Table 6 shows the size of the payments varies significantly between the study sites.3 The average participating household in Lam
Dong had received 8,919,307 VND (US$425)/yr while in Son La it
was only 120,092 VND (US$ 7)/yr. Payments in Lam Dong were
significantly larger than the other site for two reasons. One, the
provincial level of payment was much higher (400,000 VND/ha)
and two, households were often contracted to protect larger
amounts of forest. In Son La, payments were much smaller (no
more than 100,000 VND/ha) and were made for protection of 15 ha
or less. Son La also provided more community-based PES payments,
which were often spent on community infrastructure like supplies
for classrooms, leading to lower payments to households.
In addition to influencing the base rate of payments, households
also were able to influence when and how the payments were
made, although this had been achieved in only in one of the two
sites. Households and communities had stressed during the pilot
phase that PES payments needed to be both regular and dependable, which were considered even more important that the total
amount of payments. As one man said in a Lam Dong focus group,
“It's really important that payments be on time. You need to depend
on them. You need them for school fees or to buy fertilizer at certain
times. If the payment doesn't come when you expect it, it's a big
problem”. In Lam Dong, households had requested that PES payments come every 4 months on set dates, noting that quarterly

payments were more convenient as they often came at times of the
year when cash was desperately needed, such as in fall at the start
of the school year and in January before the start of the Lunar New
Year. Households interviewed in focus groups stated that the most
important factor in the timing of payment was that they were
regular, and not late. In several villages in which we interviewed
households, the forest owners (such as the national park management board) had been late with distributing payments, and this had

3
The majority of households (94 HH) in our survey sample had received some
sort of forest protection payments (PES or other smaller types of funds, like for
reforestation) from different sources (both Vietnam government or donor projects).


P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440
Table 7
Changes in forest practices made after receiving PES payments.

No changes in personal forest practices
Stopped land conversion
Stopped logging
Stopped fuelwood collecting
Replanting/regeneration
Preventing others from using forest
Preventing forest fires by others
Other

Lam Dong

Son La

23%
0%
15%
2%
3%
66%
73%
18%

31%
3%
21%
31%
10%
41%
62%
7%

(Source: Field survey, 2011).

caused trouble for some households that had needed the money to
pay off the debts at a certain time. In Son La the most common
payment was only once a year, which households said was not that
important, because the total amount of the payment was so low in
most cases that it did not make sense to distribute it in multiple
tranches: “It's barely enough to buy snacks and ramen”, complained one older woman in a Son La focus group.
3.5. Outcomes of the pilots
Government officials have declared the PES pilots to be a success
on both environmental and social fronts; Lam Dong officials have

claimed that PES is responsible for a 15% reduction in poverty and a
50% reduction in environment violations, though it is not clear how
these figures were derived (Winrock, 2011). Monitoring has been
fairly lax, as so far no spatial data have been used to assess changes
in land use in either pilot since they began. State forest owners have
been responsible for monitoring in Lam Dong; for example, a ranger
station of a state watershed forest in Don Duong district organized
weekly monitoring schedules for the PES user groups, rather than
letting them self-organize, and these reports were passed upwards.
The provincial forest department in Son La is supposed to conduct
PES monitoring but does so infrequently.
The lax monitoring appears to have serious consequences. From
our survey work, it is not entirely clear the extent to which new
forest payments will serve to alter forest management for participating households and communities. Fully 25% of households in
our survey reported having done nothing differently in terms of
land use after having received PES funds (Table 7). For the other
households that reported active land use management, most indicated that they primarily monitored forests on a weekly, biweekly
or even monthly basis for forest fires, but did little else to protect
forests under their PES contracts. In Lam Dong, the majority of
changes involved preventing forest fires and keeping outsiders out
of forests. In Son La, the majority of households stated that they had
not done anything different, while some prevented forests fires or
outsiders or restricted fuelwood collection. The very low size of
payments in Son La was likely a contributing factor to the less active
changes in forest protection activities.
Perhaps because the project had required little in the way of
costs, participants had generally positive things to say about their
participation in forest protection projects. Of the participants in PES
projects, 76% reported positive benefits: 60% of households reported general environmental benefits, like water and flood prevention, while 40% reported the main benefit was the cash
payments. Other reasons given in focus groups for being approving

of PES included better access to other non-timber products,
increased access to timber, receiving access and tenure rights to
land, increased voice and participation, and more friendly neighbour relations. The remaining 24% of households in the survey reported having negative experiences with PES forest protection
projects. Of these households, most felt the labour requirements for

433

protection were too onerous, while several thought PES caused
conflicts between neighbours and communities.
Yet despite the generally positive perceptions of PES, a number of
households reported dissatisfaction with payment amounts; 67% of
those who had gotten a payment felt it was too small for the amount
of time they put into forest protection. Suggested amounts for
payments ranged from 50,000 VND/ha in areas of Son La that were
not receiving any payments, to several households who suggested 5
million a year/ha. The average suggested amount was 781,750 VND/
ha, which is almost double the current amount of payment in Lam
Dong (400,000VND) and significantly higher than Son La's payments of 100,000 ha/yr. Other suggested co-benefits in addition to
cash payments included land tenure certificates for permanent land
rights; several households who suggested community infrastructure investment; and some who suggested in-kind payments of rice.
4. Discussion: variegation in PES in Vietnam and globally
As noted in the previous section, PES schemes have tended to
have wide variation in implementation and outcomes, and this
variegation calls into question whether or not PES should be
considered broadly neoliberal. The Vietnam case study confirms
this point, and also highlights the challenges in meeting in particular the goals of efficiency and conditionality, two hallmarks of the
market approach, as we discuss below.
4.1. Local influences on PES: distributional and procedural equity
The Vietnam case points out that local influences on PES often
revolve around perceptions of equity, which has been a topic of

considerable interest in the broader PES literature (Corbera et al.,
2007b; Mahanty et al., 2013; Martin et al., 2014; van Noordwijk
and Leimona, 2010). For example, McDermott et al. (2013) identify distributive, procedural and contextual equity as important
concepts, indicating that participants will judge PES on how well
benefits are shared (distributive equity), how participatory the
development of PES was (procedural equity), and the power relations and capabilities between actors (contextual equity). As
Muradian et al. (2010) point out, “a PES scheme that leads to an
unfair distribution of benefits and costs among stakeholders has a
lesser chance to be acceptable and legitimized by some of the
concerned agents … Since different fairness criteria are championed by different stakeholders in any given PES scheme, the political economy of which criterion prevails is something that ought
to be looked upon with due care in any PES design” (p. 1204).
In Vietnam, the households in the two pilot sites clearly shared
ideas of distributional equity in that they successfully protested the
application of K coefficients, which had resulted in uneven payment rates for different types of land. The local sentiment was that
equal effort should receive equal payment; other studies in Vietnam have noted similarly strong feelings toward equal benefit
sharing (Petheram and Campbell, 2010). These preferences for
egalitarian payments have also been noted in many other PES sites
outside of Vietnam as well, where “perceptions of unfairness can
undermine the effectiveness even of incentives that provide
apparent net benefits” (Sommerville et al., 2010a, p. 1263).
Yet preferences for equality were primarily confined to equality
of payments among the participating households and communities; nonetheless, in both sites in Vietnam, there were households
who were not selected to participate in PES projects (particularly
those who were not already connected into forest protection programs) and this resulted in inequality in procedural justice and
access. For example, in one focus group in Bon Dung village in Lam
Dong, non-participants noted that in their minds, “PES is not fair
because not everyone can take part. People are picked [to


434

P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

participate] according to who they are related to or their relations
with the village head,” as one respondent stated. This mirrors
concerns in other PES settings that equity might be achieved among
participants, but not in comparison with non-participants
(Clements et al., 2010; García-Amado et al., 2011). This problem
highlights the fact that communities are not homogenous, and the
divisions that characterize them will play out in resource control
and access as well; this can lead to some leaders or more connected
households making PES commitments which others do not share
(Milne and Adams, 2012).
The outcomes of problems with distributional equity could be
seen in Lam Dong in particular, where focus group respondents said
that there were cases of non-participants clearing forests out of
spite “because people are mad that they haven't received PES
money. If they see fires or deforestation they also don't want to
report it to the authorities because they aren't taking part in PES”,
as one middle-aged woman noted. The exclusion of some households in both PES sites in Vietnam was largely a function of historical factors (past participation in forest protection projects or
having previously received land from forest allocation) combined
with concerns that PES participation would impose labour costs
that some households could not bear. These concerns remind us
that historical configurations of access, participation and property
influence the social relations that govern how PES will be locally
effective (Corbera et al., 2007a, p. 588; Pascual et al., 2010, p. 1238).
Procedural justice was also less well achieved in Vietnam, as local
service providers were not involved in the policy making process,
particularly in the development of Decision 380 and Decree 99.
Further, participation in both sites was only nominally voluntary,

with some households complaining that they had been coerced into
being involved, especially in Son La where contracts to communities
were more widely used. In other sites in Vietnam where donors have
tried to establish PES projects, there is often a lack of awareness of
what PES is, even among forest officials (Simelton et al., 2013). Such
problems with true participation in the development of PES from the
start are common in the wider literature; for example, many forest
carbon projects, even those that claim to place a high priority on
procedural justice, do not meet even basic requirements for participation (Suiseeya and Caplow, 2013). Corbera et al. (2007b) for
example note that over three-quarters of the households they
interviewed in four PES project sites in Latin America had never been
consulted in the process of implementation, let alone participated as
full stakeholders. Further, participation in procedural equity should
not just involve sellers. In Vietnam, there was no mechanism for
either the sellers or buyers to reflect their feedback and comments to
the PES pilots; in one interview, one buyer (a vice president at a
hydropower company) had a number of suggestions on better ways
to assess water pricing that would more accurately reflect the local
situation, but he said he had no opportunity to offer this feedback.
While procedural justice often confers legitimacy on PES projects (Corbera et al., 2007a), the Vietnam case does show that it is
possible to have improved social outcomes even with minimalistic
participation. For example, particularly in Lam Dong, both households and state forest institutions who were interviewed noted that
PES had offered opportunities for the two sides to meet more often,
resulting in better, less conflictual relations between villagers and
officials of state lands, such as Bi Duop National Park. Officials at the
national park believed that there had been far fewer cases of illegal
logging and arson after PES implementation, which they attributed
to ‘better feelings’ between the two sides.
4.2. Impacts on efficiency and conditionality
Efficiency, additionality and conditionality have been primary

goals of the market-oriented approach to PES from the start

(Landell-Mills, 2002). Efficiency refers to the idea that conservation
outputs should be maximized while costs of the conservation are
minimized, thereby reaching a Pareto outcome, and markets are
presumed to do this more efficiently than regulations that apply to
everyone (Engel et al., 2008). Additionality references the idea that
PES payments should induce ‘additional’ conservation actions that
would not have happened in the absence of the payment (Sierra
and Russman, 2006). Conditionality refers to the idea that the
ecosystem service needs to have actually been provided, otherwise
the compensation/payment will not be provided (Engel et al.,
2008). The potential trade-offs among efficiency and other social
concerns like equity have long been a concern for PES (McAfee,
2012b; Pascual et al., 2010).
In the Vietnam case, these efficiency goals were not being met
by the PES project for a number of reasons. First, for many households that were interviewed, there was little understanding about
how the PES approach to forest management was any different
from previous policies. Only 34% of survey respondents reported
that they had heard the term PES, while the rest had not or did not
know. Of those who had heard of PES, half thought it was a government program for forest protection. Only a handful of respondents knew that it was a program that primarily received
payments from environmental service users. Most households
thought that the PES payments that they had been receiving were
direct government payments, and were not aware that they were
payments that had been made by hydropower or water companies
to the provincial government, which then disbursed these monies.
Because households received their payment via local government
officials, they simply assumed the PES money was a state subsidy
program, like many others they were familiar with (for example,
the state provides free education and health care cards to any

ethnic minority, and free salt and radios to people classified as
poor). PES payments were often seen as yet another of these state
charity-type programs, which made it difficult to understand the
idea of conditionality (that is, the payments may stop if forest
protection does not happen). As a result, many participants treated
PES as a government entitlement fund and not a conditional
environmental fund.
Further, because the enforcement and checking of PES contracts
had been rather loose, most households felt that they were not
restricted from continuing existing land use practices, including, for
example, collecting fuelwood and other forest products, or clearing
small fields for agriculture. The lack of linkages between PES contracts and payments and requirements to change land use practices
is seen in the fact that 25% of participating households accepted PES
payments yet did nothing differently. This shows a clear inefficiency
in program design from an economic standpoint. Yet when the pilots
attempted to develop tiered pricing so that different service providers were compensated according to their actions, local level actors perceived this as unequal and unjust. Equal benefit sharing,
rooted in social and cultural norms, thus may challenge attempts to
impose efficiency and conditionality, and too much focus on economic efficiency may aggravate local equity concerns.
4.3. Is PES neoliberal in Vietnam?
The PES projects in Vietnam share many similarities with other
PES approaches in the global South. The pilots have largely been
state-led interventions, with a top-down involvement of state
ministries and departments, rather than the market, such as in the
specifications for the exact rates to be charged for water and
electricity, as well as naming the buyers/payees who were
mandated to participate (all of whom were state-owned or invested
enterprises, like public utilities). Local governments have been
clearly placed to act as middlemen in managing PES payments and

P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

distribution between buyers and sellers, which has resulted in an
expansion of state forest bureaucracies at provincial levels. The two
pilot provinces had actually hired new state employees to run and
disburse the payment funds. Even in other areas where donors
were implementing smaller PES pilots, they also required involvement of the state and other intermediaries (T. T. T. Pham et al.,
2010).
Although this result may be a result of Vietnam's long previously
socialist history, there is little capitalist penetration into new sectors facilitated by PES; nearly all money in PES is being moved
around from development aid agencies (which subsidize many PES
projects) and individual consumers through state-owned companies to other state intermediaries and households, and there is
almost no role for private capital in this system. One representative
of a state forest farm that was receiving PES credits interviewed in
December 2011 noted that PES is primarily about “taking [money]
from the right pocket of the government and putting it in the left
pocket”. Indeed, in descriptions of the PES projects from the Vietnam government, the words ‘market’ never occur; rather, PES are
described as transactional payments, which implies regulatory
approaches (GIZ/MARD, 2012).
Commoditization has also been incomplete; with no private
capital involved, it is difficult to see how commodities could be
privatized. In all cases, households did not see themselves as
“selling” actual goods or commodities, but rather were being paid
to provide a labour service (such as patrolling forests, reporting
forest fires, or reducing fuelwood use). This seems to push back
against fears that PES will always result in “commodity fetishism”
(Kosoy and Corbera, 2010). While there is no doubt that some
highly commoditised ecosystem services in commercial markets
can exist (such as in international carbon markets) that may result
in financialization and accumulation (Bumpus, 2011; Bumpus and

Liverman, 2008; Corbera et al., 2007a; Corbera and Brown, 2010),
but these are not inevitable outcomes. Commodification can be a
tricky process, particularly given problems with scale and valuation
in PES (Bakker, 2005; Dempsey and Robertson, 2012; McAfee,
2012a).
Finally, neoliberal directions do not always result in homogenizing policies. In Vietnam, we see that despite a single national PES
policy, the two pilot sites were operating very differently. In Lam
Dong, the PES project served primarily as a labour compensation
scheme, while in Son La the program was more targeted at investment in community forest protection. This difference was
largely the result of long-standing historical factors, as in the Lam
Dong site, participating communities did not have firm land tenure,
which limited some of their ability to control land use practices.
Further variation between the two sites could be seen in the radically different size of PES payments in each province, despite a
common nation-wide price for PES user fees.
5. Conclusions: is PES neoliberal in general?
In this paper we set out to explore major issues surrounding
how neoliberal (or not) PES schemes are, and how involvement of
local actors could be useful in influencing the overall contours of
PES policy to avoid some of the predictions of negative consequences as a result of neoliberalisation. In this analysis, we have
reached several conclusions to contribute to the overall PES
literature.
First, we assessed the question of if PES schemes can be accurately described as ‘neoliberal’. Arguments over PES being neoliberal (Matulis, 2013) versus only quasi-neoliberal (Fletcher and
Breitling, 2012) versus not neoliberal at all show no signs of abating. Assertions that neoliberalism focuses only on capitalist profit
and gain (Büscher et al., 2012) do not quite do justice to the PES

435

payments seen in Vietnam and in other developing countries. In
other cases, PES policy has been used by various entrenched actors
to continue state subsidies for certain sectors (like forestry) and

does not represent any major neoliberal change (Lansing, 2013).
This strong role of the state confirms previous literature noting that
state involvement in neoliberal policies should be described more
as a “roll-out” rather than a “roll-back” of state services per se (Peck
and Tickell, 2002; Guthman, 2007). PES thus clearly fits the definition of a hybrid or third-way form of neoliberalisation that incorporates both market and state components (Corbera et al., 2009;
McAfee and Shapiro-Garza, 2010; Muradian et al., 2013; ShapiroGarza, 2013a).
This article has sided with scholars who have argued that PES
programmes in most cases are not true markets because of this
strong state role (Muradian et al., 2013; Vatn, 2010), and thus we
should pay more attention to their particularities and outcomes
rather than broadly characterizing them as ‘neoliberal’. The key
takeaway is that there is strong variation in PES schemes and that
we need better ways to conceptualise them other than neoliberal or
not, or ‘genuine PES’ or not (Muradian et al., 2010; Pirard, 2012b).
On each of the main outcomes associated with neoliberal environmental policy e namely commodification, privatization, and
retreat of the state e we see a huge range of variation from different
PES projects. For example, on one side of a continuum of “role of the
state” we have high involvement, ranging from China and Vietnam's experience of strong centralized command and control policy development involving the state as buyer, seller and manager
(Kolinjivadi and Sunderland, 2012; Liang and Mol, 2013). On the
other hand, there are some PES schemes which involve only minimal state interference, and primarily engage private actors who
buy some well-defined environmental service (Arias et al., 2011;
Blackman and Woodward, 2010). And in the middle of these two
poles, many other PES may be more accurately described as a
“hybrid model of governance, blending market principles with
existing regulatory frameworks” (Higgins and Lockie, 2002;
Wynne-Jones, 2013, p. 78). Similarly, on the question of privatization and commodification, there are high capital PES projects, such
as carbon reforestation that may require thousands of dollars per ha
for afforestation, auditing and monitoring (Corbera and Brown,
2010), to very low capital requirements, as was seen in Vietnam,
where monitoring of forests required only an investment of labour

but no capital from households, and very little sense of commodities for sale.
Indeed, the failure to establish uniform market mechanisms in
PES may be one of the most interesting and unexpected outcomes
of these policies (Fletcher and Breitling, 2012). Consequently, the
market-provided efficiency that was an original hallmark of PES is
proving difficult to harness. There are many examples of “low
additionality, low commodification, indirect schemes that have
been considered inefficient” (García-Amado et al., 2011, p. 2366),
such as examples in Clements et al. (2010), Kosoy et al. (2008) and
Van Hecken et al. (2013) and case studies in Muradian and Rival
(2013). Yet because PES has been unable to establish true markets, should this not lessen the appeal of using only efficiency as a
criterion of success? This would suggests a move away from Coasean approaches in PES and more careful looks at other approaches,
such as social influences and creation of institutions for PES
(Legrand et al., 2013; Tacconi, 2012). The institutional forms that are
best for different social challenges (like equity, conditionality and
additionality) remain an important but understudied part of the
PES literature (Martin et al., 2014; Muradian and Rival, 2013, 2012,
p. 93).
Thus our second major contribution has been to point out that
PES schemes can clearly both extend some market forces (albeit
incomplete), as well as provide spaces for contestation of these very


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P. McElwee et al. / Journal of Rural Studies 36 (2014) 423e440

processes. In other words, “attempts to neo-liberalise nature are
contingent on the existing values and practices of those who are the
ultimate targets of governing,” (Higgins et al., 2012, p. 384). As

Mansfield has noted with regard to fisheries, a policy often defined
as neoliberal “‘might be both a tool of dispossession and a tool for
challenging dispossession” (Mansfield, 2007b, p. 496). Our review
of the international literature, as well as the case study in Vietnam,
show that local actors can be successful in influencing where a PES
scheme might fall on the continuum from “very neoliberal” to
“non-neoliberal”. The “contested neoliberalisation” that has
accompanied some of these major PES policies shows that PES
projects are not one-size-fits-all, and the promised simplicity and
efficiency of market-led conservation has been overstated. Indeed,
local values of equity and justice have been able to win out over
market efficiency in some contexts. The successful transformation
of some aspects of PES projects, namely the shift toward recognition of local equity demands in payments in Vietnam, or a focus on
peasant and indigenous development goals in Mexico (McAfee and
Shapiro-Garza, 2010), lends credence to the idea that these policies
can indeed open up new spaces for participation and negotiation
over rights.
Yet just because markets are not a functional part of most PES
plans does not necessarily make them completely benign, however.
As Milne and Adams have noted, “the significance of the PES policy
model lies in the political and social effects of its design and
implementation, not in its functioning as a market per se” (Milne
and Adams, 2012, p. 136). Treating PES as political projects
involving hybrid forms of governance reminds us these projects are
“embedded in complex institutional and ecological contexts. The
design of a PES intervention typically involves political decisions
about the users and the resource base that will be targeted, the
conditions for the payments, the amount to be paid, and the overall
goal of the policy” (Muradian and Rival, 2012, p. 97). PES studies
therefore need to focus on understanding these socio-institutional

contexts, particularly notions of fairness and justice, as relative
understandings of poverty and well-being among both users and
providers of environmental services can influence community
support for PES plans.
To conclude, future PES plans face many challenges, and researchers need to pay attention to the specific problems that
accompany the continuum of non-market to market-like PES. Researchers have already begun to do this by moving away from
overly simplistic analysis of “neoliberal natures.” Future approaches
that instead offer empirical analysis of how and where PES is more
successful than other policies, and when PES is inappropriate or
unable to address systemic root issues, are clearly needed. Additionally, paying attention to the contingent and contested nature of
PES schemes, particularly where they can be adaptive and more
flexible, such in response to provider and user demands, will be
another important future area of research.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of
the National Science Foundation Geography and Regional Science
Division grant #11028793: “Downscaling REDD policies in developing countries: Assessing the impact of carbon payments on
household decision-making and vulnerability to climate change in
Vietnam”. The Vietnam team is also supported by a USAID Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research grant: “Research
and capacity building on REDDþ, livelihoods, and vulnerability in
Vietnam: developing tools for social analysis of development
planning”. The Economy and Environment Program for Southeast
Asia (EEPSEA) of the International Development Research Centre
(106269-00000000-019) also provided a grant to Vietnamese

collaborators for fieldwork on PES issues in 2011. The support of
Director Dr. Hoang Van Thang, and assistance of Mr. Le Toan, Mr.
Dao Minh Truong, and Ms. Ha Thi Thu Hue of the Centre for Natural
Resources and Environmental Studies, and of Ms. Ha Tu Anh of
Tropenbos International Vietnam, is gratefully acknowledged.

Support in the field sites of Lam Dong was given by Vice-Director Le
Hung, Mr. Le Van Son, and Mr. Le Quang Minh of Bi Duop National
Park, Mr. Le Van Trung of the Lam Dong Department of Forest
Protection, and Mr. Le Tham of the Lam Dong Province Forest Fund,
and in Son La the support of Mr. Thuan, Mr. Hung and Mr. Le Manh
Thang of the Son La Department of Forest Administration and the
assistance of Mr. Diep Xuan Tuan and Ms. Lo Thi Kieu in survey
interviewing, is gratefully acknowledged.

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