Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have gained widespread prominence as a flagship solution for ecological challenges and attracts multi-billion-dollar annual investments. This large-scale meta-analysis analyzes the epistemic, methodological, and ethical–political assumptions of over 1,000 peer-reviewed articles on PES from 2005 to 2019. Results highlight that effectiveness of PES outcomes, design of PES policy, and market-based valuation of ecosystem services serve as predominant thematic focus areas for research. Considerations such as gender equality, power asymmetries, and the recognition of multiple relational values around human-nature interactions in PES, have received much less attention. Despite research recommendations from the literature emphasizing the need for greater social contextualization in future PES research, much of the literature remains decontextualized from political histories of the territory shaping local social and ecological relations. Results also demonstrate a clear presence of Global North institutions dominating where the scientific expertise on PES is assembled (representing 73% of studies), while 81% of studies collect their empirical data in the Global South. This asymmetry in where knowledge gets generated and extracted is mirrored by methodological homogeneity that risks reproducing a colonial bias of remote and universal expertise. The analysis also demonstrates the extent to which PES gets hyped as a proposed solution to ecological challenges often without any credible evidence. Decontextualized speculation around success, research that ‘helicopters’ into locations to introduce and make PES fit for purpose, and the highly asymmetrical control of the PES research agenda between Global North and South risks worsening social and ecological crises on the ground.

生态系统服务付费（PES）作为应对生态挑战的旗舰解决方案而受到广泛关注，每年吸引数十亿美元的投资。这项大规模荟萃分析分析了 2005 年至 2019 年 1,000 多篇关于 PES 的同行评审文章的认知、方法论和伦理政治假设。结果强调了 PES 结果、PES 政策设计和基于市场的估值的有效性生态系统服务是研究的主要主题重点领域。诸如性别平等、权力不对称以及对 PES 中人与自然互动的多重关系价值观的认识等考虑因素受到的关注要少得多。尽管文献中的研究建议强调未来 PES 研究需要更大的社会情境化，许多文献仍然脱离了该地区塑造当地社会和生态关系的政治历史。结果还表明，北半球的机构明显主导了 PES 科学专业知识的汇集（占研究的 73%），而 81% 的研究在南半球收集了经验数据。知识产生和提取的这种不对称性反映在方法论的同质性上，这种同质性有可能重现偏远和普遍专业知识的殖民偏见。该分析还表明，PES 在多大程度上被炒作为生态挑战的拟议解决方案，而这往往没有任何可信的证据。对成功的脱离情境的猜测，研究“直升机”进入地点以引入并使 PES 适合目的，