Scalling up payments for watershed services (PWS)

To explore ways that small-scale pilot watershed protection projects, which use payments for environmental services (PES), can be scaled up to higher levels. The project aims to influence project implementers and policy makers in making informed decisions about the optimal spatial and temporal scale of watershed PES, including through joint analysis and cross-site visits of implementers, policy makers and politicians. The project will build upon on-the-ground experiments in three continents and use a comparative analysis to generate knowledge and capacity building tools that can be shared globally, including trying to explain the different degrees of development of watershed payment schemes across the tropics. Adapting the approach from elsewhere in Bolivia and incorporating lessons learned from two other developing countries will help to put the lessons learnt in Santa Cruz into perspective. This will ensure that the international public goods produced are more adaptable, the recommendations are more robust, and that the potential replicability of the model is greater.