Limits to learning: the struggle to adapt to unintended effects of international payment for environmental services prog
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Limits to learning: the struggle to adapt to unintended effects of international payment for environmental services programmes Dirk‑Jan Koch1 · Marloes Verholt1 Accepted: 6 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article pioneers new thinking on learning by organizations created by international environmental agreements, especially the boundaries within which learning can take place. It hypothesizes that there are ideological, institutional and technical boundaries to learning, which negatively impact the effectiveness of international environmental programming. This theory is rigorously tested by applying it to a group of new programmes, the forest-focused payment for environmental services programmes, which find their origin in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The article systematically researches unintended effects of these programmes and clusters them into four categories. The uncovering of these unintended effects leads to the main research question: do international organizations actually succeed in adapting to these unintended effects? By combining three methods (a structured literature review, a systemic internal programme document analysis and expert interviews), the research finds that organizations struggle to adapt to these unintended effects. Whereas some of the limits to learning can be overcome by enhancing technical capacities, other limits, notably those that are induced by ideological thinking and institutional imperatives, are hard to overcome. Keywords Payment for environmental services · Unintended effects · Policy learning · Bounded policy learning · Redd+ · International organizations
1 Introduction There has been a strong rise in the number and size of payment for environmental services programmes in the world (Ezzine-de-Blas et al. 2016), and this number is set to increase further as countries start to increase their funding for climate change mitigation activities (United Nations Framework Convention Climate Change, UNFCCC 2018). There are payments for environmental services as diverse as watershed management, marine resources * Dirk‑Jan Koch [email protected] https://www.ru.nl/personen/koch-d/ 1
Radboud Social Cultural Research, Radboud University, Montessorilaan 3, Postbus 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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management, biodiversity management, and forest management. This research focuses on forest management, as here payment for environmental services is now in vogue and donors are channelling hundreds of millions of dollars into these programmes via, for instance, the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, and the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programmes of the United Nations (Bayrak and Marafa 2016). These programs were initially proposed by international environmental agreements, notably the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This article contributes to two strands of literature. First, it contributes to the literature on t
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