YPAT is a pioneer scheme in Colombia. The case is the first publicly-funded PES experiment at sub-national level. YPAT emerges in response to deforestation, water shortages and agricultural expansion in Cundinamarca and an overall disconformity in the regional government with land purchasing as a key conservation strategy. The institutional history of the programme demonstrates that several design and implementation adjustments occurred over time which included changes in the payment type, the entrance of a new programme implementing actor, and changes in eligibility
criteria (re-targeting). These changes resulted in the gradual sophistication of the scheme and an increased concern towards generating the basis for measuring and achieving environmental additionality in terms of water improvement.
Three factors explain the process of institutional change within YPAT: first, the growing experience during the first phase of the programme, which resulted in a refinement of its environmental goals and a change in the perception of who should be the most suitable providers of the desired ecosystem services; second, the involvement of PN, a new experienced stakeholder, which introduced both a discursive and practical shift within the programme; and third, changes in national environmental regulations which affected the scheme’s goals. These three factors are identified in policy change literature as drivers of policy modifications (Gunderson, 2008; Kallis, Kiparsky, & Norgaard, 2009; Sabatier
& Jenkins-Smith, 1993).
The involvement of PN in Phase 2 marks the shift from passive to active adaptive management and was critical in the mainstreaming of a new PES discourse at implementation level. This new discourse considers PES an integral environmental planning tool that should complement, and not substitute, other state policies for land-use management and conservation, such as traditional command-and-control instruments or capacity building interventions (Moros, Corbera, et al., 2019). This vision of PES has become more apparent during Phase 3, when payments have been set according to existing legal land-use restrictions on the lands allocated under the programme. For example, plots located within protected areas can now, in principle, participate in the programme but they will only obtain a fraction of the total potential payment, since forest conservation in these areas is, by law, compulsory. This change in Phase 3 reflects PN’s willingness to promote PES within a policy mix approach that considers environmental
policy problems complex enough and impossible to resolve with a single policy instrument (Ezzine-de-Blas, Dutilly, Lara-Pulido, Le Velly, & Guevara-Sanginés, 2016).
The issuing of PES national law was an additional driving factor for changes in eligibility criteria. Upon the signature of the Peace Accord between the FARC guerrilla and the Colombian government, many laws that aimed at contributing to territorial peace-building were issued. Among these, the PES law mandated that PES should target conflict-ridden municipalities or areas where illicit crops are grown (Law No. 870, 2017, Chapter II, Art. 8). The inclusion of such criterion in YPAT’s Phase 3 should thus not be seen as an active strategy from local PES promoters to bridge the potential gap between efficiency and equity considerations in PES practice, but rather as a response to a government mandate.
It is interesting to highlight that the institutional changes that took place within YPAT were not the result of pressures from the general public or enrolled participants (Sabatier, 1988). The programme has until now followed a top-down design approach and it is likely that, due to the geographical dispersion of Phase 1 and Phase 2 participants, the latter lacked the group identity and social capital required to push for changes that better fit their interests and demands. Further, it is also probable that third phase participants will have greater participation in decision-making for at least two reasons. First, the programme is actively seeking to create and extend a conservation discourse based on the concept of “shared responsibility”, and on the idea that participating peasants are “water stewards”. In our view, such an attempt by the YPAT implementing actor to create a sense of project ownership and identity among participants might lead the latter to demand greater participation, at least in strategic programme decisions. Second, YPAT has recently started implementing collective conservation agreements with communities
located in key selected watersheds. This factor could also further enhance the collective action capacity and decision-making power of participating communities.
The evidence presented in this article contributes to PES debates about environmental targeting (ET). YPAT re-targeted its selection criteria in Phase 3 to include areas with high ES provision using multi-dimensional socio-ecological criteria. These targeting criteria are fairly common around the globe: 50% of the cases reviewed by Wunder et al.
(2018) follow multi-criteria ES targeting. However, this process of re-targeting followed a “logic of exclusion”, through which more than 130 former participants were excluded from implementation, a situation which could potentially result in negative consequences in terms of distribution and participation. However, as our analysis has shown, the excluded participants are not necessarily less well-off than those who have remained in the programme, whilst the implementing actor is becoming more sensitive to equity in access (e.g., allowing landholders who lack property titles to enrol in the programme) and to equity in outcomes (e.g., limiting benefits to large landholders and those that are required by law to preserve ES). However, the programme was and is still characterized by low participation of landholders in strategic decision-making.
Exclusion due to re-targeting might also raise motivation crowding out concerns. The analysis of covering two periods of time, however, suggests that exclusion from the programme generates motivation crowding in, if anything. Removed participants from Phase 1 report higher guilt related motivations in 2018 than in 2017, and removed participants from Phase 2 report higher intrinsic motivations in 2018 than in 2017. This result indicates that instead of crowding out pro-environmental motivations, the participation and later exclusion from a PES programme might reinforce intrinsic
motivations to preserve the environment. This result is counterintuitive because we would have expected crowding out of intrinsic motivations as a consequence of frustration, increased perceptions of injustice (Alpízar et al., 2017b; Alpízar, Nordén, Pfaff, &
Robalino, 2017a), or a decrease in social belonging brought about by no longer being part of YPAT.
Psychological literature has, in fact, identified that social exclusion, for instance, decreases pro-social behaviours (Twenge, Baumeister, Dewall, Ciarocco, & Bartels, 2007). However, we interpret this indication of crowding in as a result of contract length or time of exposure to the programme. Phase 1 participants were enrolled for a maximum of 16 months and Phase 2 participants for up to 24 months. It is likely that crowding out is not observable within this narrow time-frame; a hypothesis that is worth testing empirically in the future. Second, participants of Phase 2 were also obliged to attend training workshops about the crucial role of ecosystems in human well-being. The learning derived from the workshops may potentially explain the increase in intrinsic motivations among Phase 2 participants. Another feasible explanation to motivation crowding in is self-selection. It is possible, and in fact very frequent in PES programmes, that highly motivated individuals applied to and enrolled on the programme in its early phases. Therefore, what we might be observing is a reinforcement of intrinsic motivations among already motivated participants. An alternative explanation for this suggestive result is related to the level of dependency on payments. If payments do not represent a large share of household total income, then it is likely that they do not have a strong impact on participant’s motivations (Handberg & Angelsen, 2019) . However, this explanations doesn’t seem to be plausible in this case because, based on the available data
for a sub-sample of former participants (n= 33 P1 and n=66P2)13, we found that the median share of payments over total monthly income is 25% for P1 and 37% for P2. If payments represent a large share of total income, then being excluded from the programme would represent a significant economic shock for the household that might result in changes in motivations. However, we might also expect an interaction between payment size and contract length. These are, of course, hypothesis and possible interactions that deserve further research.
However, these results should be interpreted with caution for, at least, two reasons: first, our empirical strategy lacks baseline data for motivations prior to the introduction of payments, which means that our measures of motivations are already affected by participation in the programme, and, second, our sample size of former participants with panel data on motivations is very limited, which limits the robustness of our conclusions regarding motivation crowding in effects (we could reach only 8% of former Phase 1 participants and 37% of former Phase 2 participants).
Overall, YPAT represents a regional adaptive management experiment. The first phase of the programme was underpinned by a passive management approach in which experimentation with targeting and design criteria has been neither deliberate nor an explicit outcome of the changes in the programme. Rather, decision-making was modified as stakeholders’ experience grew in a context of time pressures and pronounced nonconformity with creating a market mentality for conservation (Williams, 2011). The
13Household income is based on self-reported data, contract length and total payment during the contract are based on official programme information. We could calculate these figures only for a sub-sample of total participants because official programme data had missing information for a large fraction of former participants. We report the median estimate because data is highly skewed to the right, and reporting the
second and third phases of the programme represent a shift towards an active management approach characterized by the redesign of policies in response to feedback from key stakeholders such as PN. In the third phase, a logic of budget expenditure that was predominant in phases 1 and 2, which pushed implementers to show results in terms of hectares enrolled, gradually disappeared as a result of the ordinance that guaranteed budget allocations to YPAT for the next 20 years. This long-term political and financial support is expected to release time pressures related to the yearly execution of public funds and to allow YPAT to pursue an active management approach in which “feedback and redesign cycles can be planned and enacted” (Sims et al., 2014: 1157).