Over the 5-years of the project we will explore the key relationships among environmental governance, natural resource conservation and poverty alleviation by conducting comparative analyses across a suite of sites to help fill critical gaps in our knowledge. Key concepts, best practices and lessons learned will be made available in brief, accessible and engaging formats, with content being directly relevant to the conservation and development community for making future programming decisions. At a continually growing network of case study sites, we are exploring the relationships between two core issues – 1) payments for ecosystem services (PES) and 2) property rights and resource tenure.

We are focusing on PES because they are a relatively new and rapidly evolving mechanism for conserving ecosystem services and securing livelihoods outside of protected areas. We are simultaneously focusing on property rights and resource tenure because PES mechanisms are unlikely to be effective in meeting their joint conservation and livelihood goals without secure and equitable resource governance systems. To insure we address a comprehensive set of issues related to these themes, TransLinks case study sites have been selected to represent a wide range of approaches to PES and a diversity of natural resource management strategies. This network of sites will continue to expand throughout the life of the program.