Browsing by Author "Shapiro, EN"

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Open Access
Forest conservation and slippage: Evidence from mexico's national payments for ecosystem services program
(Land Economics, 2012-10-17) Alix Garcia, J; Shapiro, EN; Sims, KRE
We investigate a Mexican federal program that compensates landowners for forest protection. We use matched controls from the program applicant pool to establish counterfactual deforestation rates. Deforestation was reduced by 50% in enrolled parcels, but expected average clearing rates without the program were low (0.8% per year), suggesting modest total avoided deforestation benefits. We test for two types of slippage: increased deforestation on other property belonging to program recipients and increased deforestation within markets where there are high levels of program participation. We find evidence of both, with substitution impacts reducing program effectiveness in common properties by about 4% on average. © 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.
Open Access
Impacts of payments for ecosystem services on deforestation in Mexico: Preliminary lessons for REDD
(Land Tenure Briefs, 2010) Alix Garcia, J; Shapiro, EN; Sims, KRE
Open Access
Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico: Nature, neoliberalism, social movements, and the state
(Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2010-07-01) McAfee, K; Shapiro, EN
Prominent advocates of payments for ecosystem services (PES) contend that markets in biodiversity, carbon storage, and hydrological services can produce both conservation and sustainable development. In Mexico's national PES programs, however, conceived as models of market-based management, efficiency criteria have clashed with antipoverty goals and an enduring developmental-state legacy. Like other projects for commodification of nature, Mexico's PES is a hybrid of market-like mechanisms, state regulations, and subsidies. It has been further reshaped by social movements mobilized in opposition to neoliberal restructuring. These activists see ecosystem services as coproduced by nature and campesino communities. Rejecting the position of World Bank economists, they insist that the values of ecosystems derive less from the market prices of their services than from their contributions to peasant livelihoods, biodiversity, and social benefits that cannot be quantified or sold. These divergent conceptualizations reflect contrasting understandings of the roles of agriculture and of the state in sustainable development. The Mexican case exposes contradictions within neoliberal environmental discourse based on binary categories of nature and society. It suggests that conservation policies in the global South, if imposed from the North and framed by neoliberal logic, are likely to clash with state agendas and local development goals. © 2010 by Association of American Geographers.