PES-MAKING THEM WORK: A COMPARISON OF “SUCCESS FACTORS” OF PES IN THE US AND GERMANY Brief description

Ecosystems provide services that are essential to human well-being and survival. Yet, most ecosystem services are external to the market system. Different ways to address this market failure are at hand. Traditional and most common is to use the power of the state to enforce environmental laws and regulations. More recent, payments for ecosystem services (PES) have become an increasingly popular approach to deal with environmental problems worldwide. PES are based on the beneficiary pays and provider gets principle: ES beneficiaries who are willing to pay for an ES are linked to providers of such ES in contract like arrangements. PES are discussed to hold great promise as a more flexible and innovative tool when compared to command and control measures. However, the success of PES is hard to grasp and there are many notions of what exactly makes PES succeed. In this world café session we undertake the endeavor to identify what actually are the influencing factors that make a PES successful. Thereby, the world café session builds upon experiences from two workshops– hold in April 2012 in Burlington, VT, USA and in October 2012 in Berlin, Germany – where practitioners from the state, civil society and private sector discussed relevant factors for successful PES. Based on the first-hand experience they analyzed successful PES examples from practice and identified their ‘conditions’ for success. The main goal of the session is to stimulate a critical debate on PES success enabling factors against the backdrop of different frame conditions in the United States and Europe. Ultimately, we hope that the session will generate creative input for the recent discussions on PES and moreover, give insights in what factors are particularly crucial for the development and implementation of successful PES-schemes on the ground.