The impacts of payments for forest ecosystem services programs on sustainable rural livelihoods in developing countries: a systematic review

This review assessed the sustainability of rural livelihood assets from implementation of payments for forest ecosystem services programs (PFESPs) in developing countries. The study aimed to test an overall hypothesis that PFESPs could contribute to sustainable livelihoods for program participants (PPs) better than for non-participants (NPs) by constructing a sustainable livelihood index (SLI). A systematic assessment design was used to collect and analyze data from 34 PFESPs in developing countries across 41 dependent studies. The SLIs for both groups were explored using the UK Department for International Development (DFID) methodology based on the five livelihood capitals (natural capital - NC, financial capital–FC, physical capital–PC, human capital–HC and social capital–SC). The main findings were emphasized by applying the equal weighting approach, the Mann-Whitney U test and Fisher p-value combination. Then, alternative weighting schemes (from ±5% to ±15%) were applied to conduct sensitivity analysis (SA) of the main findings. Both the equal and alternative weighting approaches supported our overall hypothesis that PFESPs offered more benefits for PPs in PFESPs than for NPs and their five livelihood indices were generally unbalanced showing skewed pentagons. The main findings revealed that PPs’ SLI’s value was 0.74 (potentially sustainable degree) compared to NPs’ SLI’s value of 0.41 (potentially unsustainable). Although the difference in overall livelihood value between the two groups was determined at the statistical significance of p < 0.05, the size strength was small (r < 0.3). While the alternative findings suggested that the SLI outcomes of both groups were generally responsive to any single input changes around the base case (equal weighting), the low SI (≤10% or Score 1) was found as the most common for both groups, but higher for PPs (82%), compared to NPs (56%). However higher SI rates were more common for NPs than for PPs. The policy implications for SRL should be based not only on SA results, the relationships between livelihood inputs weighting schemes and expected sustainable livelihood outputs, but also on the specific place-based context and stakeholders’ inputs.