Fourteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Payments for Environmental Services (PES) emerged since the 1990s as a central environmental conservation policy across the Global South, first in Latin America and then elsewhere. PES typically disburse conditional cash or in-kind transfers for the protection of forests, often among ‘poor’ families and communities. While there is now literature on ‘benefit sharing’, i.e. the distribution of PES’ benefits and costs, we know little about the complex and changing ways in which communities distribute PES revenues. This paper examines these questions among four communities in Marqués de Comillas, a municipality in the Mexican Lacandona Rainforest. The paper builds a framework that considers land institutions and local preferences in shaping community revenue distribution. Based on in-depth, qualitative research conducted during 2013-2018, the paper shows that community revenue distributions are complex and changing, involving combinations of cash disbursal among individuals and groups, and different types of collective investments. I show that distributional outcomes are mostly determined by pre-existing land institutions, and that distributions tend to reproduce existing land inequalities. Yet, we also show that by injecting significant amounts of resources among ‘poor’ forest-dwellers, involvement in PES may inadvertently influence communities to re-examine their local notions of land property, and motivate powerful actors to devise new claims over land rights that legitimise exclusionary processes and allow them to effectively ‘cash in’ on PES. Based on these findings, we argue that there is a need for continuous reflection on the dynamism of PES revenue distribution and its links with land and other resource inequalities.