Abstract

Scholarship on payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs have often overlooked the role of culture to explain important variations in local PES governance. This paper is a first stab at introducing Cultural Theory to analyze how different cultural worldviews for natural resource management (NRM) influence PROSAPIX, a local PES program, in Mexico. We show that the government’s hierarchical worldview coexists with local historically-forged egalitarian worldviews. SENDAS, the PES intermediary NGO, advocates for a PES governance that empowers ejidos (communally-owned lands) for bottom-up decision making and depart from the government’s hierarchist culture. SENDAS also tries to balance conflicting worldviews about the commons and nature that arise between ejidos and PES neoliberal culture. We argue that variations in PES governance are never simply the effect of individual values and behavior but are closely linked to how social groups culturally understand natural resource management and the clash and cooperation that emerge among them.

摘要

支付生态系统服务（PES）计划的奖学金常常忽视了文化在解释当地PES治理中的重要差异方面的作用。本文是介绍文化理论以分析不同的自然资源管理（NRM）文化世界观如何影响墨西哥本地PES计划PROSAPIX的第一步。我们表明，政府的等级世界观与当地历史悠久的平等世界观共存。SENDAS，PES中介非政府组织，倡导PES治理，以赋予ejidos（公共土地）自下而上的决策权，并脱离政府的等级制度文化。SENDAS还试图平衡关于ejidos与PES新自由主义文化之间出现的公地与自然的相互矛盾的世界观。