Over the 5-years of the project, we will explore the key relationships among environmental governance, natural resource conservation and poverty alleviation and, based on lessons learned, will support best practice in the integration of these three pillars of sustainable development. Key concepts and lessons learned will be gathered with partners from sites around the world; exchanged through workshops and training events; and integrated into decision making tools. All of these materials 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.

A key focus of this work is paymens for ecosystem services (PES) because they are relatively new and rapidly evolving mechanisms 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 is synthesizing lessons learned from field projects and sites, which have been chosen 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.