Payments for ecosystem services in Mexico: Nature, neoliberalism, social movements, and the state

Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza is an Associate Professor of the Practice of Environmental Policy and Management at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She serves as the Faculty Director for Engaged Scholarship for Duke University, the Director for Community Engagement for the Duke University Superfund Research Center and the Director of the graduate Certificate in Community-Based Environmental Management. 

Shapiro-Garza is Human-Environment Geographer whose research explores the ways in which human communities interact with environmental initiatives and approaches meant to influence their management practices and behaviors and the role that broader economic, political or policy trends, as well as inequality in access to power and resources, play in those dynamics and outcomes. She is a broadly trained social scientist with a primary methodological specialization in qualitative methods and analysis. Depending on the questions raised, she collaborates with economists, ecologists, remote sensing specialists, and environmental and public health researchers. Applying the framing and methods from these multiple disciplines, she conducts research on the following topics:

• Market-Based Environmental Policies and Programs
• Payments for Ecosystem Services in Mexico                                                                       
• Climate Change Mitigation through Forest-Based Carbon Offsetting in Peru and Mexico
• Climate Change Adaptation by Smallholder Coffee Producers in Latin America
• Environmental Health and Justice in North Carolina

In exploring these topics, she has partnered with agricultural cooperatives, indigenous communities, government agencies and community-based non-profits in Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala and the southeastern United States. Her research is published in highly ranked, peer-reviewed journals in geography and in the fields of her collaborators, as well as in fora and formats relevant to the policy makers, practitioners and the communities with whom she partners. The most substantive funders of this scholarship are the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, the Tinker Foundation, and the International Institute for Impact Evaluation (3ie) Foundation.