Payments for environmental services (PES) schemes are widely promoted to secure ecosystem services through incentives to the owners of land from which they are derived. Furthermore, they are increasingly proposed to foster conservation and poverty alleviation in the global South. In this article, we analyze the social relations that have shaped the design, implementation, and outcomes of a PES scheme in Pimampiro, Ecuador. While previous studies describe this case as successful, we show that the PES scheme reinforces existing social differences, erodes community organization, undermines traditional farming practices, and perpetuates inequalities in resource access in the “working” landscape inhabited by the upstream peasant community paid for watershed management. We argue that PES schemes are thus not neutral initiatives imposed upon blank canvases, but intersect with existing development trajectories and power relations. We conclude that analyses of PES need to look beyond conservation to critically examine local resource management and distribution.

This article explores how payment for environmental services (PES) approaches envision, design and actively constitute new hydro-social territories by reconfiguring local water control arenas. PES aims to conserve watershed ecosystems by repatterning and commoditizing the link between ‘water service providers’ upstream and ‘water consuming’ populations downstream. Two case illustrations from the Ecuadorian highlands are used to clarify how PES implementation – though presented as if it were apolitical and neutral – weakens locally crafted hydrosocial territories in favour of dominant interests. If consolidated, this depoliticized PES implementation fosters the consolidation of new (market-environmentalist) territories, subjects and interactions, further marginalizing the less powerful upstream communities’ livelihood strategies.

Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) is not only a prominent, globally promoted policy to foster nature conservation, but also increasingly propagated as an innovative and self-sustaining governance instrument to support poverty alleviation and to guarantee water, food, and energy securities. In this paper, we evaluate a PES scheme from a multi-scalar and political-ecology perspective in order to reveal different power dynamics across the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus perspective. For this purpose, we analyze the PES scheme implemented in the Hidrosogamoso hydropower project in Colombia. The paper shows that actors’ strongly divergent economic and political power is determinant in defining how and for whom the Nexus-related water, food, and energy securities are materialized. In this case, the PES scheme and its scalar politics, as fostered by the private/public hydropower alliance, are instrumental to guaranteeing water security for the hydropower scheme, which is a crucial building-block of Colombia’s energy security discourse. For this, the water and food securities of the adjacent, less powerful communities are sacrificed. Examining the on-the-ground politics of WEF Nexus is key to understanding their impact on equitable and sustainable governance of water, energy, and food in the everyday lives of millions of resource users. We conclude that politicizing the Nexus can help to trace both the flows of resources and the flows of power.

Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) projects are increasingly flourishing throughout the globe on the grounds that EbA constitutes a particularly community-friendly solution for adaptation to climate change as it brings about an array of co-benefits. However, the promotion of EbA projects, by development agencies and conservation NGOs, remains blurry as it has not yet been contrasted against evidence on its effectiveness in delivering these benefits. Employing a political ecology perspective, the applied conceptual framework allows for the assessment of the social benefits and costs that EbA projects generate or reinforce and factors that influence the distribution of these social benefits or costs. This research is done in regards to two EbA projects in Colombia: one in the Andes focusing on water provision services from páramos, and the other in a coastal mangrove focusing on regulation services of extreme coastal events. Based on data collected by a qualitative multi-method approach, we find evidence that the assessed EbA projects generate a wide range of perceived social benefits and costs for the local communities living in the vicinity of the project sites. Furthermore, we identify agent-level (i.e., capitals and preferences) as well as structural factors (communication, participation, local and institutional context) that influence the generation and distribution of those social benefits and costs. Finally, this paper illustrates some of the contradictions and tensions in which EbA projects are implemented and how they may end up affecting the adaptive capacity of the communities involved in EbA projects.