Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindío, Colombia

The effectiveness of conservation
interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services
(PES) is often evaluated, if it is evaluated at all, only at
the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by
the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently
successful interventions may not result in long-term
conservation benefits, a problem known as that of
permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the
permanence of land use change induced by a short-term PES
program implemented in Quindío, Colombia, between 2003 and
2008. This the first PES program to have a control group for
comparison. Under this program, PES had been found to have a
positive and highly significant impact on land use. To
assess the long-term permanence of these changes, both PES
recipients and control households were re-surveyed in 2011,
four years after the last payment was made. We find that the
land use changes that had been induced by PES were broadly
sustained in intervening years, with minor differences
across specific practices and sub-groups of participants.
The patterns of change in the period after the PES program
was completed also help better understand the reasons for
the program s success. These results suggest that, at least
in the case of productive land uses such as silvopastoral
practices, PES programs can be effective at encouraging land
owners to adopt environmentally-beneficial management
practices and that the benefits will persist after payments cease.