Direct and Indirect Payment for Ecosystem Services in Bac Kan Province, Vietnam: Are Households More Satisfied When There Is No State Involvement?

概要

九州大学学術情報リポジトリ
Kyushu University Institutional Repository

Direct and Indirect Payment for Ecosystem
Services in Bac Kan Province, Vietnam: Are
Households More Satisfied When There Is No
State Involvement?
SON, Cao Truong
Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment, Vietnam National University of Agriculture

CASSE, Thorkil
Roskilde University

MILHθJ, Anders
Copenhagen University

LAM, Nguyen Thanh
Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment, Vietnam National University of Agriculture

他

https://doi.org/10.5109/6796261
出版情報：九州大学大学院農学研究院紀要. 68 (2), pp.177-187, 2023-09. 九州大学大学院農学研究院
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J. Fac. Agr., Kyushu Univ., 68 (2), 177–187 (2023)

Direct and Indirect Payment for Ecosystem Services in Bac Kan Province, Vietnam: Are
Households More Satisfied When There Is No State Involvement?
Cao Truong SON1, Thorkil CASSE2*, Anders MILHθJ3, Nguyen Thanh LAM1,
Do Thi NHINH4 and Mitsuyasu YABE
Laboratory of Environmental Economics, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics,
Faculty of Agriculture, Kyushu University, 819–0395, Fukuoka, Japan
(Received May 9, 2023 and accepted May 18, 2023)

Payments for forest ecosystem services (PFES) have been widely implemented in Vietnam, and the
environmental, social, and economic outcomes are becoming increasingly clear. However, the difference
between the voluntary PFES schemes—which are a contract between an environmental service provider
and service user—and indirect schemes, where the state acts as an intermediate, is not as well understood.
In this study set in Bac Kan province, we discuss differences in payments, household satisfaction between
the two schemes, and deforestation rates. Villagers from the Ba Be district can participate in either a state–
induced PFES program (hydropower plant service user) or in a voluntary scheme (national park and tourist
facilities are the service user). We interviewed 105 in the state–induced PFES program and 29 in the voluntary PFES scheme. Using a multiple–choice–based survey question of life satisfaction expressions from
local people, we show a negative and significant correlation between participation in the voluntary scheme
and life satisfaction among the households surveyed. In normal conditions, we would expect households
participating voluntarily in the PFES program to show more satisfaction than households compelled to participate in an indirect program. We conclude that the unexpected finding could be linked to poor households, with little negotiating power against service buyers such as homestays and food providers.
Key words: Bac Kan province, bargaining power, life satisfaction perceptions, payment for forest ecosystem
services (PFES)

(Engel, 2016). Later Wunder et al. (2018) added a few
preconditions for PES to function of which one was crucial, namely ES users’ willingness to pay is higher than
ES providers’ willingness to accept compensation.
Criticisms of using PES to solve environmental problems have been made by scholars with very different
agendas, who propose that either PES is not a market–
based instrument, or PES’s introduction creates pre–
conditions to the privatization or commodification of natural resources. If the ES is not tradeable, voluntarism is
questionable in state intervention to force contact
between buyers and sellers, and many PES programs
lack monitoring and sanction instruments. They thus do
not meet the criteria defined by Wunder (2005). At the
other end of the spectrum, we find scholars concerned
with the risk of nature becoming an arena for furthering
the inflow of market ideologies. Although the original
idea was to increase support for conservation, PES has
transformed into an approach to seek payments or create an artificial conservation conceptualization linked to
the circulation of new capital and leading to the commodification of nature (Fairhead et al., 2012). In a
study from Mexico, Corbera et al. (2019) observe that
PES can enable develop an agreement on forest management but might fail in the long term to deliver an institutional arrangement regarded legitim by the entire community.
In between these two ideological opposites, several
scholars focus on how PES plays out in practice. An
important question is whether the overuse of natural
resources is best handled by regulation or whether it is
preferable to revert to another form of conservation PES

I N T RODUCTION
Many countries are increasingly using payments for
ecosystem services (PES) as a tool for natural resource
management. Examples include Costa Rica’s PSA program (Pagiola, 2008); the PROFAFOR carbon sequestration program in Ecuador; the national program for
hydrological services (PSAH) in Mexico (Muñoz–Piña et
al., 2008); and the sloping land conservation program of
China (Bennett, 2008).
PES schemes offer financial compensation in
exchange for the provision of ecosystem services such as
forest protection. Wunder (2005) used a definition with
three prominent criteria: First, PES is a voluntary, negotiated framework… Secondly, what is brought needs to
be well–defined…Third, in any PES, there should be
resources going from at least one ES (environmental services) to at least one provider. The definition is based
on a Coasean approach by which an externality problem
is solved without state involvement (Hausknost et al.,
2017, Ostrom et al., 1992). In practice, the conditions
are often violated because the environmental services
(ES) are public goods and transaction costs are high.
Usually, to address the challenge of high transaction
costs, public agencies intervene to act as intermediates
Faculty of Natural Resources and Environment, Vietnam
National University of Agriculture
2
Roskilde University, Denmark
3
Copenhagen University, Denmark
4
Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Global Society,
Kyushu University
* Corresponding author (Email: casse@ruc.dk)
1

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C. SON et al.

also becomes a means to support social norms in favor of
conservation (Cranford and Mourato, 2011). If PES can
influence the ES providers’ livelihoods, a more positive
attitude to protection is expected. In a meta–study of
PES programs in developing countries, Lieu and
Kontoleon (2018) find that programs tend to achieve a
positive correlation between access to PES and impact
on livelihoods; however, this effect is only significant at a
10% level of livelihood improvement. Being limited to
only 15 programs, the study does not provide conclusive
evidence of PES’s influence on livelihoods. Conversely,
other studies find no signs of supporting the argument
for a pro–poor approach in PES, or at least report
mixed–message results from comparing similar geographical sites (Narloch et al., 2013; Pagiola, 2008).
Looking at how design principles are implemented in
practice, Wunder et al. (2018) highlight that only a
minority of PES programs are sanctioning non–compliance with objectives and very few programs use cost.
Enforcement might be seen as difficult to implement
since stakeholders could regard sanctions as politically
sensitive.
Closely related is the question of fairness and transparency. Unfair outcomes often raise doubts about the
legitimacy of PES programs on the ground and may
increase transaction costs or, worse, trigger social conflicts (Narloch et al., 2013). Transparency is particularly
needed in PES schemes where the state intervenes
(indirect payment schemes), and verification becomes
complicated and relies primarily on trust in the performance of the environmental service provider (Muradian
et al., 2010). Summarizing various PES experiences,
Pascual et al. (2010) differentiate between an egalitarian
fairness approach (equal payment per hectare), an
expected provision criterion (the difference between
types of forests), and an essential provision criterion
(payment based on an estimation of carbon sequestrated
in each landholder’s plot).
Generally, PES programs could be divided into
direct payment and indirect payment programs (Engel et
al., 2008) or user–financed and government–financed
schemes (Schomers and Matzdorf, 2013). In the direct
payment program, the buyers are usually service users,
and schemes are intended to be efficient given that
actors with access to information are directly involved.
The service buyers of indirect payment programs are significantly different because they are not direct users, but
act on their behalf. Most of them are government institutions or NGOs. Buyers are not direct users, have less
access to information, and might show less interest in
overall efficiency. In the following, we focus only on PES
arrangements with forests as the commodity under
negotiation in the natural resource arrangements.
In Vietnam, the national PFES program began in
2010 with Decree No. 99/2010/NĐ–CP on “Payment for
forest ecosystem services.” (Government of Socialist
Republic of Vietnam, 2010).
In this Decree, the
Vietnamese government confirmed the two types of
PFES, namely direct and indirect payment systems
(Article 6: Forms of payment). The content of the

Decree also indicates the four types of forest services
that could apply PFES: (i) Watershed forests; (ii)
Conservation forests and ecotourism forests; (iii)
Forests to become carbon sinks to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions and sustainable forest development, conservation of biodiversity; (iv) Forests providing spawning grounds, natural water, natural feeds, and breeding
sites for aquaculture activities.
With Decree No.
99/2010, the PFES policy has been widely implemented
in various Vietnamese provinces. After five years of
implementation, the national evaluation conference of
the PFES program stated that this policy received significant public support (Vietnam Administration Forestry,
2015). However, the panel additionally pointed out the
lack of a genuine monitoring and evaluation mechanism
in the Vietnamese PES model. ...

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