Pagamentos por serviços ambientais: experiências internacionais e o desenvolvimento de programas no Pantanal de Mato Grosso do Sul

Abstract

In a context of increasing environmental pressures and the search for instruments capable of reconciling conservation and development, Payments for Environmental Services (PES) have been gaining prominence in public policies worldwide. Given the high ecological relevance of the Pantanal and the socio-environmental challenges faced by this biome, PES programs have been proposed in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (MS) as a strategy to promote the conservation of native vegetation and to address wildfires. This thesis has two objectives: to systematically review the international scientific literature on Payments for Environmental Services in order to identify, classify, and systematize how empirical studies have characterized the design and implementation attributes of these programs, as well as the types of measurable outcomes that have been evaluated; and; to analyze the development of PES programs in the Pantanal of MS, with a focus on native vegetation additionality and on wildfire prevention and suppression. To achieve these objectives, two complementary methodological approaches were employed. In Chapter 2, the PRISMA protocol was applied to conduct a systematic review of international empirical studies. In Chapter 3, the concept of “management situation” was adopted through a qualitative and interpretative approach to analyze how PES programs in the Pantanal were built in a participatory manner, based on institutional, technical, and political processes. The results of the systematic review, based on 17 empirical studies conducted in 11 countries, show that the international PES literature remains strongly oriented toward the measurement of environmental impacts, which are reported as positive in most cases. However, the review reveals recurrent gaps in the explicit consideration of central design and implementation attributes. Spatial targeting, payment differentiation, mitigation of adverse selection, financial sustainability, persistence of effects, leakage risks, behavioral effects (crowding in/out), and equity appear irregularly and, in most studies, are not even mentioned. These findings indicate that although PES have become a consolidated empirical object of evaluation, the accumulated knowledge remains fragmented regarding the institutional and operational conditions that structure their effectiveness. The analysis of the Pantanal case shows that these attributes do not emerge as previously given technical properties, but as contingent outcomes of institutional construction processes. The development of the PES Conservation and PES Brigades programs revealed a management situation marked by uncertainty, interinstitutional negotiations, interpretative conflicts, and political costs, in which territorial prioritization devices, eligibility criteria, governance mechanisms, and operational arrangements were progressively constructed. The creation of the Environmental Services Index and the territorial multicriteria model illustrates how principles widely discussed in the literature, such as additionality, targeting, and conditionality, had to be translated into technical and normative instruments in order to become politically and administratively viable. By articulating international evidence with a concrete empirical experience, this thesis suggests that the effectiveness of PES depends less on the formal existence of payments and more on the institutional capacity to build, sustain, and adapt governance arrangements that make these instruments environmentally, socially, and politically operational. In doing so, it contributes to theoretical advancement by integrating impact evaluation and process analysis, and to the practical improvement of PES in productive and environmentally sensitive territories such as the Pantanal.