Payments for Environmental Services (PES) are premised upon the provision of monetary incentives to induce land-use practices viewed to be beneficial for advancing tropical conservation. A recent article published by Pagiola et al. in this journal claims that PES successfully transitioned land-use from agricultural use in Matiguás-Río Blanco, Nicaragua to silvopastoralism through afforestation and hence associated improvements in carbon sequestration and biodiversity conservation. Building on contrasting perspectives from peasants and local organizations in the region for more than a decade, we illustrate why viewing relations like payment provision and adoption of land-use outcomes that disregard parallel voices of implicated actors is not only analytically imprecise, but risks being anti-ecological if such a decontextualized connection is used to show evidence that tropical conservation is being advanced. We argue that the effect of payments must be contextualized with: a) increasingly globalized and expanding commodity frontiers for which PES programs may actually further advance to the detriment of tropical conservation; and b) the assumptions made in the methodological approaches adopted to determine causality. In sum, we highlight the dangers of uncritically portraying narratives of “success” to scale up investment to further proliferate decontextualized conservation projects that may not ensure long-term outcomes. We propose responding to these potential dangers through more open, horizontal, and long-term engagement on both the criteria and the consequences of defining success in tropical conservation interventions with actors whose lives are directly affected by them.

环境服务付费 (PES) 的前提是提供货币激励措施，以诱导被认为有利于推进热带保护的土地使用做法。Pagiola 等人最近发表的一篇文章。在本期刊中，PES 成功地通过植树造林将尼加拉瓜马蒂瓜斯-里奥布兰科的土地利用从农业用途转变为林牧，从而改善了碳固存和生物多样性保护。基于十多年来该地区农民和当地组织的对比观点，我们说明了为什么看待支付条款和采用土地使用结果等关系而忽视相关参与者的平行声音不仅在分析上不准确，但是，如果使用这种脱离背景的联系来证明正在推进热带保护，则可能会产生反生态的风险。我们认为，支付的影响必须与以下背景相关联： a) 日益全球化和不断扩大的商品边界，PES 计划实际上可能会进一步推进，从而损害热带保护；b) 在确定因果关系所采用的方法学方法中所做的假设。总而言之，我们强调了不加批判地描绘“成功”叙事以扩大投资以进一步扩散可能无法确保长期结果的脱离背景的保护项目的危险。我们建议通过更加开放、横向、