This paper presents a broad overview of payments for environmental services (PES) experiences in Cambodia. First, we explore the legal and policy environment for PES, including its promotion by international donors and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and its uptake by government actors. This reveals a long-standing uncertainty over whether the government is willing to support PES, and a lack of clarity about what PES actually represents in practice. Second, taking a broad definition of PES, we examine the full range of payments-based schemes for conservation currently operating in Cambodia. These include community-based conservation agreements, direct payments for biodiversity conservation, PES schemes in the context of hydropower, and REDD+ schemes in the context of climate change mitigation. Overall, these payment schemes demonstrate mixed environmental and social effects; and they face a range of technical and practical challenges, relating to the governance context of Cambodia and difficulties in securing any ‘willingness to pay’ for environmental services beyond donor-funded schemes. More profoundly, these findings illustrate that ‘environmental services markets’ do not naturally come into being; but instead require a lot of political and discursive work, institution-building, and donor funding to become established. For this reason, we see PES succeeding only in isolated cases, with dedicated NGO-backing and the presence of niche markets. Beyond that, we observe significant challenges for PES and REDD+ in Cambodia, relating mainly to the apparent ‘state capture’ of these mechanisms. Such an outcome risks the erosion of conservation and local livelihood objectives that international donors and buyers of environmental services are seeking. It also presents the ethical problem of PES and REDD+ being absorbed into the Cambodian regime simply as adjuncts to the status quo.

This book brings together a talented international group of scholars, policy practitioners, and NGO professionals that explores a range of issues relating to environmental, developmental, and governing challenges on the Mekong, one of the world’s greatest rivers and, alas, one of the most endangered. The book is divided into three sections devoted in turn to historical perspectives on the Lower Mekong Basin. Issues relate to livelihood strategies, environmental threats, and adaptation strategies; and various aspects of river governance, with individual authors treating questions of governance at different levels of refraction and in different registers. The result is a fresh and innovative collection of essays, which, taken together, provide much-needed new perspectives on some of the most important and seemingly intractable environmental and development issues in contemporary Asia.

This report synthesizes the country studies on PES schemes in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam – that were prepared for a regional review – to compare the various schemes, to assess their current status, implementation processes and lessons learned, and to draw policy recommendations relevant to REDD+. A summary discussion of the definitions of PES is provided, given that the definitional issue is raised in the individual reports. That discussion is used to present a comprehensive framework of the key design features of PES, which is then used to outline the features of the PES schemes in the four country studies before presenting a comparison of their key features and issues. Then, the key lessons learnt from the country studies and this review, as well as the policy recommendations relevant to REDD+, are derived.

REDD+ must be transformational. REDD+ requires broad institutional and governance reforms, such as tenure, decentralisation, and corruption control. These reforms will enable departures from business as usual, and involve communities and forest users in making and implementing policies that a ect them. Policies must go beyond forestry. REDD+ strategies must include policies outside the forestry sector narrowly de ned, such as agriculture and energy, and better coordinate across sectors to deal with non-forest drivers of deforestation and degradation. Performance-based payments are key, yet limited. Payments based on performance directly incentivise and compensate forest owners and users. But schemes such as payments for environmental services (PES) depend on conditions, such as secure tenure, solid carbon data and transparent governance, that are often lacking and take time to change. This constraint reinforces the need for broad institutional and policy reforms. We must learn from the past. Many approaches to REDD+ now being considered are similar to previous e orts to conserve and better manage forests, often with limited success. Taking on board lessons learned from past experience will improve the prospects of REDD+ e ectiveness. National circumstances and uncertainty must be factored in. Di erent country contexts will create a variety of REDD+ models with di erent institutional and policy mixes. Uncertainties about the shape of the future global REDD+ system, national readiness and political consensus require  exibility and a phased approach to REDD+ implementation.

A major challenge in trading ecosystem services is the need to quantify and commoditise services, for monitoring and verification as well as for trade. This is relatively straightforward for goods such as forest honey or shade-grown coffee, but potentially complex for services such as water purification, reducing risk from floods or other disasters or carbon sequestration. Developing certification systems for forest ecosystem services is one potential way to define, quantify and verify these services in a way that buyers can trust, and this is why certification of ecosystem services is promoted by a number of environmental and forestry NGOs. Certification of ecosystem services is a useful concept, but many practical and theoretical obstacles must be addressed before it can be put into practice. This paper is a review of existing development in certification of ecosystem services, with information useful for designing and implementing projects to evaluate the efficacy of new systems. We discuss the potential use of more holistic concepts for measuring management sustainability, which are to date undeveloped and untested, and recommend developing pilot projects that are specifically designed to address a number of challenges inherent to ecosystem service certification.

This novel text assembles some of the most intriguing voices in modern conservation biology. Collectively they highlight many of the most challenging questions being asked in conservation science today, each of which will benefit from new experiments, new data, and new analyses. The book's principal aim is to inspire readers to tackle these uncomfortable issues head-on. A second goal is to be reflective and consider how the field has reacted to challenges to orthodoxy, and to what extent have or can these challenges advance conservation science. Furthermore, several chapters discuss how to guard against confirmation bias. The overall goal is that this book will lead to greater conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity by harnessing the engine of constructive scientific scepticism in service of better results.