Institutional analysis of incentives for the provision of forest goods and services: An assessment of incentive schemes in Catalonia (north-east Spain)

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) have recently attracted attention as a means for aligning the interests of landowners and society by remunerating forest owners for the goods and services their forests produce. As PES schemes are being extensively adopted around the world, questions related to their institutional dimensions, as well as the role of different actors and contextual factors in PES initiation, design and implementation, arise. This paper seeks to gain an understanding of these issues by analysing three voluntary incentive schemes currently implemented in Catalonia: land stewardship — a predominantly private PES scheme aimed at enhancing biodiversity, mature forest reserves — a predominantly public scheme for protecting old-growth forest stands, and a hybrid public–private initiative for forest fire protection — forest defence groups. We develop a framework for the institutional analysis of PES extending earlier work on this subject, and we focus on actor and institutional interactions and outcomes that are likely to result from scheme implementation to draw conclusions regarding the factors that influence the success and the durability of these schemes.