Governance Challenges in Implementing Payments for Ecosystem Services in Conflict‐Affected Regions: Insights From Northwestern Colombian Amazon

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are increasingly promoted as conservation instruments in forest frontiers, yet their implementation in conflict‐affected territories remains poorly understood. This article examines how formal, participatory, and coercive governance arrangements shape PES implementation in La Macarena, Meta, a municipality in the northwestern Colombian Amazon where high conservation value, informal land tenure, cattle ranching expansion, state fragility, and illegal armed control intersect. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2021, a 2024 survey of community organization members, semistructured interviews with former PES and Visión Amazonía participants, and secondary sources on deforestation and conflict dynamics, the study analyzes how different forms of authority condition eligibility, enrollment, contract interpretation, payment security, monitoring, perceived compliance, and dispute resolution. The findings show that formal governance provides the legal and administrative architecture for PES but is constrained by weak territorial reach, unresolved tenure conflicts, and distrust rooted in histories of state neglect and militarized conservation. Community‐based organizations, especially Asojuntas and Community Action Boards, enhance local legitimacy by translating external conservation rules into locally meaningful arrangements, but they lack the authority and protection needed to enforce agreements independently. Illegal armed groups add a coercive layer of territorial authority, alternately authorizing, taxing, restricting, enforcing, or undermining conservation commitments according to shifting political and economic interests. The article contributes to environmental governance and political ecology by showing that hybrid governance is not merely a background condition for PES, but the field through which implementation is negotiated, enabled, constrained, and contested. It argues that PES in conflict‐affected frontiers requires conflict‐sensitive design, tenure safeguards, secure payment mechanisms, support for community‐based mediation, and stronger links with land governance and peacebuilding processes.