ساختن موسسات برای خدمات اکوسیستم تجاری: بازاریابی کربن جنگل در مکزیک

This paper analyzes institutional design, organizational capacity, and interplay in markets for ecosystem services. It examines the development of a market-based mechanism to commercialize forest carbon in Mexico through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This is compared with a State-run carbon forestry program aiming to provide emission rights to voluntary, retail-based, carbon markets. Marketing forest carbon is hampered by lack of organizational capacity in government and civil society, uncertainties in the international policy process, and the interplay with existing common property institutions in rural Mexico. The paper identifies theoretical and practical barriers to implementing institutional arrangements for forest carbon trading.

Markets for ecosystem services have been advocated in international policy and development practice as a means to enhance environmental conservation and to improve human well-being. Proponents argue that the benefits provided by ecosystem services or the costs of degradation are not captured in conventional markets and thus no economic incentives exist for their conservation (Costanza et al., 1997). Pricing nature’s services and assigning property rights to them will provide conservation incentives to resource users and ecosystem managers (Swingland, 2002). This assumption has translated into the development of projects marketing ecosystem services or an equivalent proxy in both industrialized and developing countries (Landell-Mills and Porras, 2002 and Robertson, 2004). In these projects, users of an ecosystem service, such as carbon dioxide fixation, watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, or landscape beauty, reward resource managers for the conservation of such service. Individuals, companies, and the public sector play important but differentiated roles, either as service providers, buyers, intermediaries, or regulators. Service providers often include farmers, rural communities, and NGOs, while buyers are private companies, state agencies, and individual citizens. Private consultancies provide ancillary services, such as investment risk assessments, monitoring, and certification services, while the public sector sets up the legal, financial, and institutional means to allow for project development. Markets commercializing emission rights generated through carbon dioxide fixation by forest ecosystems (hereafter referred as forest carbon markets) stem primarily from international efforts to regulate global carbon dioxide emissions in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. These agreements highlight the role played by land-use activities in regulating the global carbon cycle, in particular the potential of forest management and conservation to store carbon dioxide and ameliorate climate charge. However, markets for forest carbon are problematic. Firstly, there may be competing perceptions among social actors regarding the certainty and scale of the climate change problem. Secondly, these actors may challenge the rationale behind the idea of planting trees to offset emissions produced elsewhere. Thirdly, there may be competing views regarding the resource management practices which should be allowed in marketing frameworks. Finally, setting a price for carbon may be controversial. This paper aims to advance understanding of how markets for forest carbon are designed, how institutional linkages are formed, and how forest carbon projects interact with existing institutions for resource management. We adopt an institutional approach, similar to Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Ostrom, 2005), focusing on questions of institutional design, organizational capacity, and interplay as conceptualized by Young (2002) to analyze actors’ perceptions of the implementation of forestry projects developed under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol and other voluntary initiatives for marketing forest carbon. Our analysis contributes to emerging debates on cross-scale institutions for sustainable resource management as articulated by scholars such as Berkes (2002). In the next section, we examine the institutional dimensions of markets for forest carbon. We highlight the importance that institutional design, organizational capacity, and institutional interplay play in shaping the likely outcomes of these arrangements. In Section 3, we justify why we chose Mexico as a case study, present the research questions, and the data collection techniques. In Section 4, we describe the present status of markets for forest carbon in Mexico and we analyze stakeholders’ interests and perceptions on the future development of CDM forestry projects. We do not undertake an evaluation of these projects because at the time of the research there was only one voluntary offset project located in the state of Chiapas and neither the CDM nor the State-based program had generated any project. Section 5 discusses our findings in the light of our institutional theoretical framework before drawing conclusions in Section 6.

This paper analyzes the development of markets for forest carbon in Mexico. It shows how the government has been active in supporting these activities at the UNFCCC level through the AIJ and the CDM, and in recently establishing a national system of payments for ecosystem services, which includes a Carbon Forestry Program (CFP). Even so, there is only one AIJ forestry project in the country trading in the retail market and there are no CDM forestry projects. The CFP has translated into the development of several carbon forestry projects, which have been designed to strengthen local capacities and increase the likelihood of resource managers participating in international carbon markets in the future. It also shows that the interests and views of government officials, academics, NGOs, and multilateral agencies concerning institutional arrangements to market forest carbon do not necessarily coincide. While some view the CDM as an opportunity to increase the funding sources for forest rehabilitation, management and protection, and rural development, others see this instrument as a new form of environmental colonialism. In contrast, the CFP is better supported because of its State-led character and the flexibility of its procedural rules. Stakeholders also identify a number of issues which may limit the implementation of CDM forestry projects. These include the exclusion of conservation activities from the CDM and its procedural complexity, the lack of organizational capacities and expertize throughout Mexican civil society, the relatively small investment window that CDM forestry represents to date, and the common property system underlying Mexican rural property, which may hinder international investors’ willingness to invest in forestry projects in the country. Our analysis exposes several challenges to be resolved before it is possible to guarantee effective management of the global atmospheric commons through market-based forest carbon trading. Firstly, this type of institutional arrangement does not yet have sufficient support from all civil society sectors, thus limiting widespread participation in these markets. Secondly, there is a general lack of capacity across civil society actors to implement these projects in a consistent manner. Thirdly, the lack of integration between the different institutions trading forest carbon undermines any attempt to establish a uniform framework under a set of internationally agreed and legitimate rules and principles. Critical to the effective implementation of markets for forest carbon will also be the ability to design projects taking into account local property rights, socio-political dynamics, and cultural perceptions of market-based instruments.