Mapping boundaries and values in Payment for Ecosystem Services

Forests are critical spaces for climate change policy making
with deforestation and forest degradation estimated as
contributing 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. However,
efforts to implement strategies are subject to political,
social and economic tensions. While political and economic
actors favour market-based approaches such as the
Payment for Environmental Services (PES) model, they are
criticised for ignoring local complexities. Although the
importance of addressing equity in PES has been
acknowledged, and participation is required in planning and
implantation, approaches have been criticised as treating
communities as homogenous and static. Forest
communities are in fact dynamic and subject to movement
restructuring communities and reshaping the environment.
My research will explore social complexities in forest
communities at the frontier of PES projects in Mozambique
by investigating how social worth and identity produce and
reproduce unequal access to opportunities leading to low
participation in PES. This study is situated in political
ecology introducing Boundary Work and the Social theory of
Valuation and Evaluation methodologies which build on the
study of symbolic systems of classification and indirect
forms of power such as those advanced by Foucault,
Gramsci, Bourdieu, and others. I will examine how
ideologies are shaped by cultural-material contexts in
which people live: The cultural tools available along with
the structural conditions.