Abstract
•Little is known about how communities perceive conditionality, a PES feature with two components, monitoring and sanctions.•PES participants viewed monitoring more as a mechanism for technical assistance rather than a tool for compliance check.•PES participants noticed the removal of conditionality and perceived it negatively as a lack of care from the PES program.•PES participants did not view conditionality solely as a matter of surveillance and penalties to ensure conservation.•Conditionality interacts with participants’ relational values toward nature and the program, influencing PES implementation.
As global change accelerates, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs have become increasingly important tools for addressing the interconnected challenges of land degradation, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and climate change. PES programs provide incentives to individuals or communities, conditional on people adopting sustainable natural resource management practices to support or increase ecosystem service provisioning. Although conditionality is considered a “PES-defining feature,” little is known about how conditionality is perceived by community members and how such perceptions influence their participation in and experience with PES programs. To address this gap, we conducted an extensive qualitative study of Watershared, a Bolivian PES program, to investigate (1) how community members perceive conditionality in PES and its two components—monitoring and sanction, and (2) how removing conditionality influences PES participants’ perceptions of the program and relationship with the implementing organization. We found that Watershared participants perceived monitoring as more than just a compliance check mechanism; they saw it as a form of technical support and relationship building, which strengthens their relational values toward both nature and the program itself. Participants were generally unconcerned about sanctioning, with many viewing sanctioning as unnecessary or unenforceable, despite the implementing organization having imposed sanctions previously. Watershared participants with unconditional contracts generally noticed the removal of conditionality, with some interpreting it as a lack of care and reciprocity from the implementing organization. These results highlight how relational values were developed and supported through the two components of conditionality in PES. These results suggest that the role of conditionality in PES may be less about surveillance and penalty to ensure conservation, but more about serving as an avenue to activate and strengthen community members’ relational values toward nature and the PES-implementing organization, which may, in turn, improve program effectiveness and future participation. In the face of intensifying global environmental change, such relational values tied to conditionality in PES, as identified in this research, are critical for fostering and sustaining cooperation, trust, and long-term commitment to conservation.