The economic conservation instrument of payments for ecosystem services (PES) enjoys an increasing popularity among scientists, politicians, and civil society organizations alike, while others raise concerns regarding the ecological effectiveness and social justice of this instrument. In this review article, we showcase the variety of existing PES definitions and systematically locate these definitions in the range between Coasean conceptualizations, which describe PES as conditional and voluntary private negotiations between ES providers and ES beneficiaries, and much broader Pigouvian PES understandings that also assign government-funded and involuntary schemes to the PES approach. It turns out that the scale at which PES operate, having so far received very little attention in the literature, as well as critique of PES must be considered in the context of the diversity of definitions to ensure the comparability between studies researching PES programs. Future research should better target linkages between global, regional, and local scales for the development of PES programs, while taking local collective governance systems for a sustainable use of resources into account more seriously.

中文翻译：

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生态系统服务付款：对定义，空间尺度的作用和批评的评论

生态系统服务付款的经济保护工具（PES）在科学家，政治家和民间社会组织中越来越受欢迎，而其他人则对该工具的生态有效性和社会公正性表示关注。在这篇评论文章中，我们展示了各种现有的PES定义，并系统地将这些定义定位在科斯的概念化之间，这些描述将PES描述为ES提供者和ES受益人之间的有条件和自愿的私下谈判，以及更广泛的Pigouvian PES理解也政府资助的非自愿性PES计划。事实证明，到目前为止，PES的运作规模在文献中很少受到关注，对PES的批评以及对PES的批评都必须在定义的多样性范围内加以考虑，以确保研究PES计划的研究之间具有可比性。未来的研究应该更好地针对全球，区域和地方规模之间的联系，以开发PES计划，同时更认真地考虑当地的集体治理体系，以可持续地利用资源。