The frontiers of the debate on Payments for Ecosystem Services: a proposal for innovative future research

This paper offers a review and analysis of the key issues and different perspectives in the Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) debate. We discuss how the current debate has to a certain degree moved beyond ‘neoliberal’ vs. ‘non-neoliberal’ discussions, instead recognizing the variegated ways in which this policy tool plays out in the field. We argue, however, that despite this progress PES research remains weakly theorized in social and political terms, resulting in only superficial understanding of the role of culture, agency, social diversity and power relations in the shaping of PES institutions and their outcomes. Building on insights from other fields and disciplines in the social sciences –in particular critical institutionalism, social anthropology and political ecology-, we subject some of the common assumptions underlying mainstream and alternative conceptualizations of PES and identify the main issues that, we believe, deserve more attention in future research. More specifically, we explore three key challenges in current PES research related to the tendency (1) to assume that institutions can be designed in order to make them ‘fit’ specific human-nature problems; (2) to oversimplify culture and social diversity through the apolitical concept of ‘social capital’; and (3)to conceptualize human agency, collective action, and institutional change through either overly-rational or overlystructuralist models. We argue that an expanded actor-oriented, socially-informed and powersensitive conceptualization of PES can help generate novel insights in the power geographies underlying institutional logics, and thus the complex ways in which PES policies are shaped and experienced in the field.