Chela & Chele in Nicaragua: Fieldwork (Frédéric)

With this entire blog referring to the ‘touristy’ things we’ve been doing so far, people might wonder if I have forgotten that I came here with the main objective to conduct research. Actually it’s time to tell most of you a bit more about what I’m doing here (as well as last year, and the three years to come). I’m not sure I’ll manage to do it in just a few sentences and in a comprehensible way, but what follows is an attempt to write a short introduction to my research topic.

I will be working in a sub-part of the biosphere reserve Bosawás in Nicaragua, where there are a number of regulations/projects going on to try to limit the pressure on the forest. A number of people and organisations are interested in preserving this forest, because it holds a lot of biodiversity, stocks a lot of carbon and – most importantly for the local people – has a role in the regulation of the microclimate and the water quantity and quality of the region. What I will be focusing on, is the decision-making of the local farmers (what crops do they produce, what is the economic and social aspect of the different trade-offs, and how much do they take the impact on nature into account). The aim is to understand better the impact of some of the regulations and policies that have been implemented to try to conserve the nature – with a specific focus on a popular policy instrument (Payments for Environmental Services) – through their impact on the decision-making of the key actors.

A slightly more elaborate version goes as follows: (note: if you already felt bored reading the previous paragraph, you can also just skip to the part with the pictures; no hard feelings :))

Since October last year I’ve been a PhD student in Development Studies at the Institute of Development Policy and Management from the University of Antwerp. The title of my research project is “Green microfinance and payments for environmental services: from market-based panaceas towards an integrated approach to sustainable rural development. Case studies from Nicaragua”; but that might not make much sense until I’ve explained a few of the key elements of that title.

First, I assume you might already have heard of the idea of ‘sustainable development’. The concept became most popular in a big international conference of the United Nations in Río de Janeiro in 1992; of which the 20th anniversary was ‘celebrated’ this year with the United Nations Conference on Sustainable development, also called ‘Rio+20’ (www.uncsd2012.org). The most cited definition of sustainable development is “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (this definition was made at an earlier conference, which is sometimes considered the cradle of the ‘sustainable development’ term, the WCED in 1987). This concept of development comes from the confrontation with our past and current ways of seeking development, which seem to fail to deliver in terms of the reduction of poverty and inequality, and which are absolutely overshooting the limits set by the global and local ecosystems we live in.

So to do something about it, all sorts of organisations and governments are searching for and implementing policies and governance structures that are expected to change the current course of action. One of the most popular suggestions of the moment is to have ‘Payments for Ecosystem Services’ (PES). The ‘ecosystem services’ refer to benefits that people obtain from nature. This can go from services that we know quite well – such as agricultural produce – to e.g. the regulation of water quantity and quality by forests. In the context in which I’ll be working, the idea underlying the payments is twofold:

i) as people obtain benefits of those services, they are willing to pay for it to safeguard their supply

ii) if farmers are paid money when they apply the land uses that help provide these services (such as shade coffee, primary or secondary forests,…) they’ll adopt the environmentally more beneficial practices instead of the degrading activities that were affecting the environment and reduced the environmental services.

So you can see there is the idea of ‘putting a price on nature’, making it exchangeable on a market (you might have heard from the carbon market e.g.). The policy instrument of Payments for Ecosystem Services is very widespread, and links to the wider idea of ‘the Green Economy’. In microfinance (where small loans are given to people with no access to credit or financial services), the idea has started to come in gradually, with e.g. programmes where the interest rates are lowered when some environmental conditions are being fulfilled by the farmer (what I call ‘green microfinance’ in the title).

The policy is very popular, but actually there is very little proof that it is really as efficient and effective as so often proclaimed. More and more researchers, citizens, farmers organisations,… are starting to question the idea of PES. You can do so on a huge number of fronts: in terms of fairness (how are the payments locally distributed? who gets the benefits and who bears the costs?), unequal development (is it a way for the developed countries to just continue to consume and pollute?), the natural science element of it (can you really measure the services that you trade?), and so on. I think I should say I mostly focus on the idea of effectiveness, which I relate in part to fairness. More precisely, I will look more closely at the assumption that you can solve the problem by merely changing some monetary trade-off in the economic decision-making of individual farmers.

I believe that Payments for Environmental Services and the underlying economics are overlooking the importance of context in which the policies are implemented. Whether or not the policy can be successful, depends on the interaction of the payments or the conditions of the microfinance with the decision-making of the individual actors. These people are in turn influenced by and influence their social, ecological and economic environment.

To make it slightly more tangible, I’ll say a bit more about the specific case study I’m working on for the moment, and how I’ll be trying to analyse it. There’s a project in Nicaragua that is called ‘Proyecto Cambio’. It is a line of credit that (some) farmers can access, and they get a premium (a percentage of the loan) as a payment if they comply with some of the set conditions. I will be taking a look at who gets what payment for what, and how that changes their own practices as well as that of their neighbours. I will then look at it in the light of the more general resource management structures of the area, to consider whether it is making or can make significant contributions to the conservation of the natural resources in the area.

In a nutshell, that’s it…

Picture time