BOUND TO THE PROFIT MOTIVE:
The Globalization and Commodification of Costa Rica’s Payment for Environmental Services (PES) Programs
by Malcolm Wyer
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© 2025 Malcolm Wyer. All rights reserved.
Abstract
Dividing the history of Costa Rican forestry into four time periods—the forest clearing period, the regulation period, the ecosystem services period, the global development period—I chart the evolution of Costa Rica’s reforestation incentive programs between 1969-2022. I employ diagrams, maps, and other data visualizations to tell the success story of Costa Rica’s reforestation agenda. Ultimately, I argue that an adherence to a market-driven profit motive is misguided, and I evaluate Costa Rica’s Payment for Environmental Services (PES) as a subsidy program. With the arrival of the UN-funded REDD+ program, which by 2022 had paid Costa Rica USD 133 million for sequestering global carbon through Results-Based Payments (RBPs,) Costa Rica finally succeeds in its ambitions to define developed nations as the “users” of its forest services. In a closing essay, I encourage the further “decentralization” of Costa Rica’s REDD+ framework governance.
Fig 1.
This timeline divides Costa Rican forestry programs into four eras—the forest clearing period, the regulation period, the environmental service period, and the global development period. Over time, Costa Rica’s state policies increasingly promote globally-funded, market-based forestry programs.
1. FOREST CLEARING PERIOD
1940s-1980s
Until the 1980s, Costa Rica experiences what might have been the highest rate of deforestation in Latin America, driven by the demand for more agricultural land rather than by a demand for timber, with agriculture the probable cause of more than 80% of total deforestation. Most forests are cleared for cattle grazing, which requires large extensions of land to be profitable. Generous tax credits and low interest loans granted irrespective of land capability or tenure (and often subsidized by foreign agencies) provide a strong stimulus for clearing land for cattle. The extensive nature and low productivity of tropical pasture-based beef production is an underlying driver of deforestation. Two studies published in the late 1970s reveal the true status of the country’s forests. Both place the annual deforestation rate at over 55,000 hectares, showing that less than one third of the country still had remaining forest cover.
Fig 2.
This animated land cover map charts Costa’s Rica’s rapid increase in cattle pasture and rangeland between 1930-2019.
Cattle introduced by Spanish conquerors aided European expansion by occupying spaces inhospitable to colonists, destroying native environments, supporting extractive activities, and transforming relations of property, often in advance of empire.... More than just commodities caught up in the machinations of industrial production, cattle actively transform environment by entering into relations of interdependence with humans and other species. These relationships and transformations have consequences for humans and the societies they try to build. As they eat, digest, move, trample, and occupy space, cattle move in and out of expansionist projects in ways that often escape human control.
-Rosa E. Ficek
“Cattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of
the Anthropocene In and Out of Human Projects”
Fig 3.
This diagram frames the cattle grazing carbon cycle in the context of extensive agriculture: low levels of investment per hectare and low productivity.
Fig 4.
A photo depicting deforested cattle pasture in Costa Rica.
2. REGULATION PERIOD
1970s-1990s
Faced with rapidly disappearing forests, the Costa Rican government responds with a multifaceted approach. First, the impressive system of national parks was created in the 1970s. Second, a complex regulatory framework governing forestry on privately owned lands is established through the Ley Forestal of 1969 and its revisions of 1973, 1979, and 1986. Third, financial incentives are provided for reforestation, later for natural forest management, and then for forest preservation. The rate of deforestation slows at some point in the 1980s, in part because fewer accessible forests were left to convert to agriculture. (Brockett and Gottfried)
Fig 5.
Staring in the 1970s under the leadership of Alvaro Ugalde and Mario Boza, Costa Rica develops an extensive National Park system that is estimated to protect more than 4% of Earth’s biodiversity.
Fig 6.
In the 1980s and 1990s and under the direction of agencies DGF and MIRENEM, the Costa Rican government introduces regulations and incentives aimed at reducing forest loss. These measures are later seen as barriers to sustainable forestry.
A command-and-control approach requires substantial resources to succeed, especially considering that the targeted behavior usually occurs in remote areas with poor transportation and limited communication infrastructures....For many small landholders, the required documentation, advance tax payments, multiple bureaucratic procedures, and constant revisions to the permit system became too expensive to endure. Instead they have illegally harvested (or cut and burned their trees when they thought they could get away with it) or injured trees so that they could be removed after they died. Alternatively, loggers have prepared plans with no intention of following them, relying either on bribes or the knowledge that oversight is too limited to be a threat. Permits also are known to have been reused.
-Charles Brockett and Robert Gottfried
“State Policies and the Preservation of Forest Cover:
Lessons from Contrasting Public-Policy Regimes in Costa Rica”
Fig. 7. A collage by Malcolm Wyer visualizes the result of Costa Rican deforestation in 1985 during the forest clearing period.
3. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES PERIOD
1996-2009
The year 1997 witnesses the introduction of FONAFIFO (Costa Rica’s National Forestry Fund) and the seminal PES system called Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA), a compensation measure through provisions in Forestry Act No. 7575. FONAFIFO receives funds from international sources, such as through the sale of Certificado de Servicos Ambientales (CSA,) each certificate sold to private buyers representing one hectare of PSA protected forest. The funds are then allocated to landowners through the structure provided by SINAC (National System of Conservation Areas,) usually via NGOs that work with the constituent conservation area. Additional government subsidies, such as a national fuel tax, are intended to jumpstart a system that can develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem services market, capable of independence from governments and tax revenue. Ultimately, a ‘true’ market fails to develop.
Fig 8.
Targeting four ecosystem services—carbon sequestration, hydrological services, protection of biodiversity, and scenic beauty—the Costa Rican government, under the direction of FONAFIFO, develops its Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) program.
Fig 9.
Costa Rica’s initial PES program is user-financed by national and international entities making voluntary payments to landholders. It is government-financed by a national fuel tax and municipal water tariffs. Additional funding came in the form World Bank loans.
Costa Rica’s PSA in intended to transfer financial resources from “users” of ecosystem services to “providers” who institute prescribed management practices... The programme seeks to make conservation the ‘economically rational’ management option by increasing opportunities for direct financial benefit. It does so by establishing economic relationships between various actors within the country and beyond....The programme can be understood as a form of state-led neoliberalisation, necessitated by the inability of PES to self-sustain in the face of its own internal contradictions.
-Brett S. Matulis
“Persistent Neoliberalisation in PES:
Taxes, Tariffs, and the World Bank in Costa Rica.”
Fig 10.
This animated map shows the locations of Costa Rica’s Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) projects between 2010-2019. Approximately 20% of Costa Rica’s territory—1 million hectares—has received funding through its PSA program.
When analyzing spatial data, we must be specific. Global “forest cover” is a geospatial data layer that has been used to great effect in Costa Rica’s famous forest cover “striptease” maps, but it is sometimes a lousy metric of a forest’s ecological characteristics.
“Forest cover” is an inclusive category, often including any woody vegetation greater that 2 meters, as well as agroforests and tree plantations. While indeed all vegetation functions to sequester carbon, not all forests have equal ecological performance.
Fig 11.
This map of Costa Rica shows 2020 global forest cover, primary forest cover, and intact forest landscapes (IFL). While global forest cover is an inclusive category, primary forests and intact forest landscapes more discriminately consider ecological performance characteristics, like connectivity and the existence of remnant forests and habitat corridors.
Fig 12.
In a diagram by Sarah Jane Wilson et al, forest transition curves chart a change from primary forests toward secondary forests over time, defining passive versus active reforestation.
Fig 13.
This table summarizes critiques of Costa Rica’s PSA program: that PSA programs are not actually saving forests (Robalino and Pfaff,) that PSA programs exclude the poor (Zhang and Pagiola,) and that PSA programs have failed to create a ‘true’ marketplace (Brett Sylvester Matulis).
Fig 14. A collage by Malcolm Wyer envisioning Costa Rican reforestation efforts due to its PSA program in 2002, at the height of the environmental service period.
4. GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT PERIOD
2010-2022
This period represents a major expansion in complexity and scale, as FONAFIFO negotiates global funding mechanisms for its PSA program and beyond. The United Nations-developed REDD+ framework (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) propels FONAFIFO into the global carbon sequestration business and, by 2020, FONAFIFO successfully recieves USD 114 million in major carbon payments through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and through grants and loans facilitated by the World Bank.
Also during this period, Costa Rica’s Department of Agriculture and Livestock takes a global posture with the UNFCCC in developing National Appropriate Mitigation Action (NAMA) programs around livestock and coffee industries. Directed by its new Politica Agroambiental legislation, Costa Rica shifts its conservation priority from goals of biodiversity to goals of sustainable production, launching its current agro-environmental agenda.
Fig 15.
REDD+ is an international reforestation program that directs developed nations to pay for the forest services provided by developing nations. Countries that financially support REDD+ programs (forest service users) are depicted in purple, while countries that host REDD+ projects (forest service providers) are depicted in orange.
Fig 16.
Between 2008-2016, the Costa Rican legislature empowers the REDD+ program through a series of initiatives, directing MINAE and FONAFIFO to manage and monitor internationally-funded results-based payment (RBPs).
Fig 17.
The REDD+ program nests roles and responsibilities across diverse scales of organizations: village, district, province, sub-national, national, and international—employing both centralized and decentralized decision-making networks. In a final essay, I argue that Costa Rica’s REDD+ program would benefit from a more decentralized structure.
The chief inspiration behind Costa Rica’s original PSA program was to increase biodiversity by introducing primary forest conservation and reforestation. Global REDD+ projects include a broader range of aims, such as greater economic efficiency and plantation forestry. “Some argue that this shift from conservation to carbon sequestration boils down the original purpose of the PSA program.” (Matulis, 150)
With its diverse funding sources, Costa Rican REDD+ financing becomes exponentially more complex, as results-based payments (RBPs) are delivered after measurable results are rewarded by carbon offset payments from developed countries.
Fig 18.
The financing for Costa Rica’s ≈ US$ 133 million REDD+ program originates primarily with international agencies such as the World Bank and United Nations, filters through FONAFIFO, and ultimately reaching Costa Rican landholders in the form of results-based payments (RBPs).
Fig 19.
This diagram charts the distribution of Results-Based Payments through Costa Rica’s REDD+ program, highlighting the central role of middlemen played by FONAFIFO and SINAC.
Fig 20.
In an effort to assure that REDD+ payments target regions in Costa Rica with outsized social and ecological needs, Priority Conservation Areas (PCAs), mapped here, define the priorities for REDD+ eligibility.
Today, sustainable management of the land-use sector in Costa Rica can be categorized by two main objectives: conservation and sustainable production.
Conservation, particularly focused on forests and water catchment areas, is associated with the PES program, active since 1997, as well as the REDD+ initiative...Sustainable production is mainly associated with NAMAs (National Appropriate Mitigation Actions) because they have been promoted at the United Nations climate negotiations. The two NAMAs established in Costa Rica deal with the sustainable livestock/cattle management program and the low carbon coffee.... NAMAs need to be project based with the aim to change production and processing practices in the two sectors, possibly along the whole value chain.
-Linda Wallbott et al.
“Beyond PES and REDD+: Costa Rica on the way
to climate-smart landscape management?”
Fig 21.
Costa Rica’s 2016 legislation Politica Ambiental integrates conservation measures implemented by the Ministry of Environment and Energy (including PES and REDD+ programs) with sustainable production programs implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (including NAMA coffee and NAMA livestock programs).
Fig 22.
This diagram visualizes various sustainable agricultural strategies promoted through Costa Rica’s NAMA Climate-Smart Livestock Program, such as livestock genetics, locally adapted grasses, silvopastoral systems, living fences, using adapted tree species including forage trees, and manure management.
Fig 23.
This diagram visualizes various sustainable coffee-growing strategies promoted through Costa Rica’s NAMA Climate-Smart Livestock Coffee Program. NAMA programs includes remaking entire supply chains surrounding sustainable production and offering farmers subsidies for investments.
Fig 24. A collage by Malcolm Wyer that imagines a farmscape with secondary reforestation in 2025, at the height of the global development period of forestry in Costa Rica.
5. INSIGHTS
An important caveat to the ‘four periods’ framework of this report is that even in 2025, the “Forest Clearing Period” has not ended nor will it end anytime soon. The urge to transform the wild jungle into a meadow of herbicide-treated grasses runs deeper than cattle management and logging enterprise. It is a behavior rooted in a deep sense of perceived human safety and cultural order. Some scholars describe humans’ proclivity for short grasses interrupted by isolated trees as the “savannah syndrome,” a kind of genetic blueprinting that harkens back to early humans seeking safety from predators on the African savannah.
Indeed, when discussing matters of deforestation, we are talking centrally about human behavior. As Brockett and Gottfried write, “An appropriate amount of forest cover will not be maintained unless it is perceived as desirable by a country’s people.” In Latin America, Costa Ricans are unmatched in this regard; Costa Rica is democratic and stable, its society is egalitarian, and its citizenry is environmentally aware. (An environmental ethos is certainly aided by the ecotourism industry, which has quite successfully and visibly commodified primary forests to tourists.) However, despite Costa Rica being “the best-case scenario” for forest preservation, conservation advocates should never underestimate the substantial and often prolonged transition periods required by landholders willing to experiment with sustainable landscape management.
Over the course of the last thirty years, Costa Rica has undoubtedly accomplished a major feat in increasing the value of forests to landholders, and their nationwide forest cover has grown substantially as a result. Their governance policies have included a mix of strategies: state regulations, financial incentives, environmental education, and, most potently, material self-interest. With Costa Rica’s seminal Pagos por Servicios Ambientales (PSA) program in 1997, FONAFIFO (Costa’s Rica’s newly created National Forestry Fund) developed a market approach to forestry conservation. The goal was to work with national policy makers to deliver an economic payment to landholders in return for their maintaining forest cover.
But how would FONAFIFO fund these ES payments? The Costa Rican government allocated one third of a 15% fuel tax (i.e. 5%) toward the new PSA program, but budgetary constraints prevented the revenue from reaching FONAFIFO for many years. As a quasi-government organization, FONAFIFO produces a portion of its own annual budget and they have a mandate to explore non-government funding. As Walcott et al. writes, FONAFIFO is “bound to the profit motive.” From the agency’s inception, FONAFIFO began to develop contracts with private buyers of ecosystem services, for example to hydroelectric power producers. The agency also developed the Certificado de Servicos Ambientales (CSA,) each certificate sold to private buyers representing one hectare of PSA protected forest. The hope was that these certificates would continue to circulate and increase in value.
This failed to happen. FONAFIFO found itself unable to generate substantial revenue from the sale of bundled ecosystem services bought from landholders. Market-based sources of revenue accounted for 0.5% of the PSA budget from 1997-2010. In 2000, FONAFIFO quietly approached the World Bank for a USD 750,000 medium-sized grant. “Two agents of FONAFIFO laid out a vision for the PSA in which it evolves from a tax-supported, government-mediated conservation programme into one that is based on private financial relationships carried out in open markets…FONAFIFO’s role in realizing this imagined future is in facilitating the establishment of market transactions, thereby enabling state withdrawal.” However, “seeing the potential for greater impact, the Bank recommended the (proposal) be scaled up and blended with an IBRD loan. By the end of negotiations, the deal topped USD 40 million, 80% of which took for form of loans.”
Ten years earlier, Costa Rica had cut ties with the World Bank after the unpopular Structural Adjustment Plans “deeply tarnished the institution’s reputation throughout much of Latin America.” The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were loan conditions that pushed neoliberal reforms such as cutting public spending, privatizing state-owned enterprises, deregulating markets, and reducing subsidies. While the goal was to promote economic growth, the SAPs had often severe negative consequences, especially to the poor. For FONAFIFO to unilaterally approach the World Bank for a new loan was seen by some as going against the will of the Costa Rican legislature and the Costa Rican people:
To the operatives at FONAFIFO (whose mandate was to expand the PSA budget and whose tensions with the Ministry of Finance meant financial uncertainty, this relationship certainly would provide ‘stability,’ ‘oversight,’ and ‘ideas.’ To the average citizen (who had borne the brunt of austerity under Structural Adjustment) or to the segments of government hesitant to relinquish sovereignty to foreign debt, on the other hand, this relationship would provide quite the opposite: instability, loss of oversight, and ideas that were in direct conflict with their own.
The World Bank loans jumpstarted FONAFIFO’s Ecomarkets project and later the Ecomarkets II project, and the World Bank, once again, had debt revenue and influence over Costa Rican affairs. The World Bank helped FONAFIFO develop grant applications with the Global Environment Facility (GEF,) which had influence in determining what areas of Costa Rica were priorities for conservation. One of the significant alterations to PSA-financing pushed by the Bank is the 2006 institution of the “Water Use Tariff,” to PSA-financing pushed by the World Bank was the 2006 introduction of the “Water Use Tariff,” which was “imbued with the ideals of direct financial transactions between ‘users’ and ‘providers’ of ecosystem services.”8 In Latin America there is a deep suspicion, especially among intellectuals, surrounding capitalist enterprise. Accordingly, “many Costa Rican actors with a conservationist priority or a primary concern for the small landholder have not been ready to embrace many of the market-oriented proposals of recent years.” Beyond Costa Rica, market-driven conservation policy—in general—has long been controversial globally. For many environmental purists, economizing ecosystem services doesn’t get to the root causes of the climate emergency, and a system of assigning dollar values to ecological processes only perpetuates humanity’s disconnect with our planet. Globally, voluntary carbon markets have not performed well in recent years. High-profile studies have questioned the integrity of monitoring, and companies that were paying into the system have been increasingly criticized for ‘greenwashing.’ There is further debate as to whether any ‘true’ ecosystem service markets actually exist. As Milne and Adams (2012) explain:
Most attempts to implement PES have resulted in programs that simply “masquerade” as markets. Looking beneath the veneer, PES has been described as subsidies that are poorly aligned with the neoliberal ideals underpinning their design…The resulting pseudo-markets for ecosystem services have been explained—in the case of Costa Rica—as an effort to kickstart exchange before giving way to ‘real’ markets.
The PSA’s implementation on the ground has unquestionably succeeded in preserving forest cover by making payments to private Costa Rican forest owners. However, it is more than fair to say that global voluntary carbon markets failed to raise adequate revenue to fund these payments. In my eyes, it is much more productive to stop understanding PES programs as market-driven and instead call them what they really are: subsidy programs. In turn, we can continue to craft forest conservation priorities based on social-ecological system resilience criteria instead of prioritizing the market value of forests and the associated neoliberal agenda which has failed to generate self-sustaining PES markets.
While FONAFIFO failed at its mandate to generate a profit-driven ecosystem services market, it did not shy away from its ambitions to define developed nations as the “users” of Costa Rica’s forest services. That is to say that Costa Rica’s citizens could not generate a sufficient revenue (through fuel tax and water tariffs) to maintain the desired amount of forest cover unless the international community began to compensate Costa Rica for the benefits that their forests provided the entire world.
Under the REDD+ framework, between 2010-2022, Costa Rica realized this mission. Initially co-proposed to the UN by Costa Rica, REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is a globalized iteration of Costa Rica’s PSA program. Payments are results-based, and arrive only after measurable carbon sequestration. Two major international payments arrived in 2020 and 2022, first USD 60 million from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and USD 54 million from the UNFCCC’s Green Climate Fund. Additionally, Costa Rica received a USD 60 million from LEAF Coalition, approximately USD 2.5 million for its voluntary carbon market, and between USD 25-50 million through Costa Rican fuel taxes and water tariffs. While it’s a major question what future payments will come from international sources, these Results-Based Payments (RBPs) through the REDD+ program represent a major triumph for FONAFIFO.
Is REDD+ good for people as well as forests? Are PSA payments reaching a diverse group of farmers, including small landholders and indigenous groups? Accountability is slightly murky, but it appears the answer is yes. At the very least, REDD+ framework has provisions for social justice measures, and SINAC has adopted a practice of Priority Conservation Areas (PCAs) to prioritize projects in disadvantaged communities.
Of course any program framework that is based on a global initiative cannot fit uniformly in each of the more than eighty countries with REDD+ programs. Kashwan and Holahan make a case for adaptive program design so REDD+ programs can be effective on the ground. “The cross-scale nature of REDD+ explains why scholars and policy makers increasingly favor nested governance arrangements over either fully centralized or fully decentralized regimes.”
Public power in Latin America is traditionally centralized. Unlike the US, where many services are delivered to the public through nonprofit organizations, Costa Rica has limited private special interest groups. Both FONAFIFO and SINAC, the government organizations that function as the middlemen between fund providers and beneficiaries, have a certain amount of independence from the government. The relationship between FONAFIFO and SINAC is designed to create checks and balances, but it should be noted that SINAC has a broad mandate and a substantial budget. There are certainly opportunities for private organizations to share funds toward duties of advocacy, recruitment, and monitoring. Kashwan and Holahan argue for strengthening “inter-community forestry associations and forest rights movements and allowing such civil society groups an increased space during the implementation of REDD+.” Right now in Costa Rica, a lot of oversight is centralized surrounding SINAC.
Finally, it is important to address Costa Rica’s new agro-environmental and rural developmental agendas formed through the United Nations NAMA (Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action) program. Sustainable agricultural development—with livestock, coffee, and tree plantations—is essential for promoting both ecological and social resilience in Costa Rica. Profit-driven plans enacted by MINAE and MINAL, and backed by World Bank loans, have the capacity to remake entire value chains surrounding principles of sustainability. However, these neoliberal policies promote economic development more than ecosystem biodiversity, and while a teak plantation might sequester carbon, Costa Rica’s rich biodiversity demands robust, connected forests surrounding intact, primary forest.
While all global initiatives will perpetually require adaptive efforts to improve the equal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens across human communities, I argue against those anti-globalists who dismiss international ecosystem service payment (PES) programs due to objections with market-forward funding mechanisms. Essentially, the REDD+ framework is a subsidy program, plain and simple. REDD+ has succeeded in getting developed nations to make payments to developing countries for the ecological benefit their forests provide. As a result, reforestation is expanding across the Global South. The climate emergency demands that coalitions of nations endeavor in taking good faith efforts toward tackling global problems as a species.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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