Volume 2 Type Generation Age Slope Soil
7.3 Reflection on research and conceptual framework
Although the payment schemes for forest ecological services have been widely applied in China, their performance has not been carefully examined yet. Indeed, there is a lot of literature on PES in China, but most of this literature is either devoted to a general introduction on different
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kinds of payment schemes or focuses on how to design “reasonable” payment schemes from a purely theoretical perspective (Li et al., 2006b,c; Liu et al., 2007; Zheng and Zhang, 2006). Most of this research concludes that low payment standards is the main problem in the functioning of current payment schemes and recommendations thus point to the development of a more scientific payment standard or a market-based payment mechanism (Chen and Wei, 2007; Li et al., 2007; Zhang et al., 2010a). Few studies have related these analyses and recommendations to empirical examination, with the exception of a few empirical studies based on single cases, such as those of Li and Chen (Li and Chen, 2007) on Hainan, and Chen (Chen, 2006) on Fujian. But even these case studies are limited in only focusing on the evaluation of socio-economic impacts of payment schemes on local people, without paying attention to for instance participation of these local people in the design and implementation of payment schemes and the effect of that on socio-economic and environmental variables. In addition, these single case studies usually pay attention to the payment schemes themselves, neglecting the role of other institutional factors in the functioning of the schemes, such as forest tenure reform, forest management institution, and forestry industrial development policies.
Addressing these problems, this thesis attempted to provide an integrated evaluation of payment schemes based on comparative analyses of multiple cases. In doing so, an evaluative framework was developed to explore the relationship between institutional factors, the design and functioning of payment schemes, their environmental and economic performance and the role that participation played in that. The basic reasoning behind this research framework was that payment schemes are introduced in an existing (but often dynamic) institutional setting and this combination of payment scheme introduction cum institutional setting changes local forest use practices but also the institutional setting. This process sets up a set of rules on local participation and has environmental consequences and economic implications for local forest owners. And these relations and effects are better understood in comparing different cases.
This framework brought a number of advantages to this research. First, separating an institutional setting from the payment schemes provides conceptual clarity to analyze the interaction between the payment schemes and other relevant institutions. This is especially helpful since the institutional setting in China is unstable due to – in our empirical field – a series of reforms in the forest sector. Since this research started in 2007, a collective forest tenure reform has been initiated in several provinces and it brought significant changes to the structure of forest property rights in rural areas. Moreover, the payment schemes themselves also have been adjusted on payment standard and distribution due the research period. Our multiple case research design made it possible to compare different (changes in) institutional settings and to explore relations and causalities between change in forest use practice and institutional factors. Second, the research framework did introduce forest use practices into the evaluation, which focuses on rather directly measuring the impacts of payment schemes on the environment and local livelihood. This deviates from previous research which focuses very much on output indicators in terms of environment and household economics. Forest use practices, as an inclusive concept, helps to conceptualize the change in the practices and modes of forest production and consumption induced by the payment schemes. Analyzing this change in the mode of use practices provides a lot of details of the process of ecological modernization through payment schemes in a specific local context (how does the forest use change from timber harvesting to developing eco-tourism, agro-forestry
and other sustainable uses, how are daily management systems on public benefit forest set up and functioning, how are payments divided among the different actors and organizations, etc.). This is largely neglected by those earlier researches mentioned above, which only emphasize performances and consequences. Third, the framework includes participation of farmers as a procedural and an evaluative aspect. Participation is directly linked to the institutional setting and affects the design of PES, its functioning and its effectiveness (Beckmann et al., 2009). Using perspectives of political modernization as included in Ecological Modernization Theory, the study assumes that the involvement of local farmers in the implementation of payment schemes can reduce negative impacts on farmers’ livelihood, increase the legitimacy of the introduced PES schemes and as such improve the effectiveness of PES. This inclusion of participation and mechanism and outcome fills in the theoretical and empirical gap in the existing literature on China’s PES, for forests and beyond. The nature of participation is one of the things that makes China’s PES different from PES in other countries. Moreover, our focus on participation in PES contributes also to wider studies on participation and democracy at the local level in rural China.
It is worth noticing also some challenges in implementing the research and shortcomings in the evaluative framework. First, the research had to face an unstable institutional setting. China’s forest sector is experiencing rapid institutional transformations, including collective forest tenure reform, logging management reform, and policy adjustment in ecological conservation projects.
These transformations caused a series of discontinuities in the institutional setting of forest management. Collective forest reform changed the property rights structure of collective forest and logging management reform is turning the old logging quota management system into a forest management plan system. Furthermore, other ecological conservation programs such as CCFGP and NFPP also reshaped the payment policy domain by being integrated into the payment schemes, and also competing for financial resources with them to provide policy alternatives. It proved complex to clarify how, to what extent and with what “effects” these institutional changes interacted with each other and with the implementation of the payment schemes.
Second, this research is based on a kind of rational institutional theory, which takes institutional factors (rules, incentives and power) as drivers for changes of forest use practices. It indeed managed to contribute to explanations of how forest use has changed and why such change happened in specific local contexts. The payment schemes not only set up a series of rules to manage forests in a more sustainable way, but also provide financial resources to encourage such transformation in forest management. The framework also helped in noticing the role of power in China’s forest administration system, which helped in explaining the functioning of the payment schemes the rather low payments compared to the expectations of local forest owners.
While these institutional factors have been examined thoroughly in this research, the analytical framework ignored a cultural perspective on the traditions, norms, ideas and discourse about forest management and use and how these rather stable cultural dimensions (or the first dimension of Williamson’s (2000) institutional structure) influence payment schemes in local contexts. Some research has demonstrated the role of traditions and norms in community forest management (Xu and Melick, 2007). Adding a cultural dimension to the conceptual framework could provide new insights on how traditions and norms of play a role in reshaping forest management and use during the transformation of ecological modernization in China’s forest sector. It could perhaps also add insight in the “fitting” of PES in (different) Chinese circumstances.
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7.3.2 Reflection on research methods
Compared to previous literature, which either provides a general discussion on PES mechanisms based on a theoretical perspective or examines a single case, this study utilizes multiple cases and empirical data obtained via famer household surveys and interviews with key stakeholders in different regions. The trans-regional dataset offers insights into different institutional settings, including different forest tenure structures after the tenure reform and various localized payment scheme designs. To guide the analysis, a conceptual framework has been developed to address three aspects of payment schemes (environmental effectiveness, economic and livelihood impacts, and participation). The operationalization of these evaluative factors had to take into account the existing availability of forest resource and environmental data, which were usually inconsistent or even not record. To repair these data quality and availability problems, the research has to use local farmer observations and subjective assessments as indicators for environmental quality and changes in environmental qualities. Data from county or provincial authorities were also collected to carry out a basic “verification” whether the assessment of local farmers on case sites parallels with general developments and changes in the whole region. While, given the chosen research design and the availability of time and resources, it is the best what could be done in terms of assessing environmental effectiveness of the schemes, it is far from ideal. Better and more forest resources and environmental data would enable stronger conclusions as to what have been the environmental consequences of the PES schemes.
The availability of more time and resources would also have enabled the inclusion of more interviewed farmers per case study and the inclusion of more case study sites per province. The former would have given a better internal validity and would have enabled better (statistical) analyses of the environmental and livelihood effects. The latter would have contributed to furthering the external validity and the representativeness of our cases for the provinces included in this study. The inclusion of more provinces would even have enabled me to draw China wide conclusions. But more case studies could also have enabled us to sort out the contribution of various institutional and contextual factors on the (environmental and economic) performances of the schemes.
Regardless of this “wish list” of the quality and quantity of data on local payment schemes, the case studies carried out in this research do have wider relevance for understanding payments schemes in the Chinese forest sector. Other provinces in China also have the same forestry administrative structure and procedures for implementing payment schemes and they shared a similar history of developing payment schemes as the selected provinces. In addition, the forest tenure reform is also carried out nationwide. As analyzed above, the dynamics of payment schemes are determined by these factors. Hence, one can to some extent expect similar results on the performance of payment schemes in other provinces.
7.3.3 Reflection on Ecological Modernization Theory for China’s forest sector
The evaluation showed that the payment schemes in China can be understood as a process of ecological modernization in China’s forest sector. Forest resources have been protected from the threat of clearing and unsustainable use. Forest ecosystems have been maintained for generating
ecological services and products, rather than only for producing timber. Economic incentives have been employed as an important instrument to encourage the change of forest use practices from timber harvesting into protection for ecological functions. And a variety of actors, beyond the state, have been included in these sustainable forest management arrangements. All developments have been indicated by EMT under the notions of economizing ecology and political modernization, although they are colored in the case of payments schemes with typical Chinese characteristics (e.g. Zhang et al., 2007). Compared to ecological modernization inspired PES schemes in western countries, regulatory measures are still playing an important role in maintaining the Chinese schemes and reigning local forest use. The payments alone cannot guarantee a smooth transformation of forest use practices. The government plays a major role in steering the direction of ecological modernization processes through its administrative system and its financial support.
Market actors (e.g. farmers, private forest industries, tourist industry) play less significant roles in the process than in the PES schemes of other countries. However, the trend in Chinese forest policy seems to be that the strength of economic incentives and payment schemes will increase gradually, while regulatory measures might become less dominant and decisive in the future.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, there are doubts from neo-Marxist scholars on such ecological modernization inspired schemes, as marginal local farmers might become further marginalized during processes of ecological modernization in – in our case – the forest sector. This research showed that it is not evident that the implementation of payment schemes automatically traps local farmers into more disadvantaged positions, although some local farmers indeed endured income loss during the implementation. It depends very much on how payment schemes have been designed and implemented, to what degree local farmers can been involved in the implementation, and how other institutional factors such as forest tenure reform and forest industry policy interact with the payment schemes. The payment schemes could as well be a process of empowerment to local farmers; and the collective forest tenure reform seems to have enhanced such an empowerment.
Through a systematic examination of environmental effectiveness, livelihood impacts and participation mechanism of Chinese PES, the research confirms that an ecological modernization perspective can be used fruitfully for understanding and explaining the current ecological transition in the Chinese forest sector, of which the introduction of payments are part. It would be fruitful to further compare this process of ecological modernization in China’s forestry sector with similar processes in other sector, in further characterizing and contributing to a “Chinese style” Ecological Modernization Theory.