Rewarding the upland poor for environmental services: a review of intiatives from developed countries

Learning from existing mechanismsDeveloped countries have already established a number of mechanisms to implement environmental transfers either within their own country, or towards other countries, including developing nations. The present review looks at a number such of mechanisms with a common matrix of analysis and tries to draw lessons for the design of RUPES mechanisms in Asia. All these mechanisms have been designed to provide reward to farmers for environmental services, and we put the priority on the ones which were clearly targeting upland farmers. Not all these schemes had poverty alleviation as their objective, but many did have a clear social orientation, and in all cases we tried to look at whether these schemes could be targeted to reach poor upland communities.Matrix of AnalysisThe matrix of analysis is based on a number of parameters. First, we identified the type of environmental services that were supposed to be promoted by each mechanism. The following point is to identify who benefits from the said services. Another important point in the analysis is the origin of the resources for the reward. It should be directly related to the beneficiaries of the services, but because of market imperfections and lack of capacity of certain communities to finance the environmental services they need, this is not always the case. We identified four types of origins: public budgets, indirectly concerned stakeholders, directly concerned stakeholders and ‘polluters’ –firms or communities that have been identified as emitting an excessive quantity of waste or harmful elements, including carbon.

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