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Cameroonian community forests were designed and implemented to meet the general objectives of forest management decentralization for democratic and community management. The spread of management conflicts all over the country has shown that these broad expectations have not been met. We describe conflicts occurring in 20 community forests by types of actors and processes involved. We argue that a number of external (community vs. external actors) and internal (intra-community) conflicts are part of the causes blocking the expected outcome of Cameroonian community forests, fostering bad governance and loss of confidence. Rent appropriation and control of forest resources appear as systemic or generalized conflicts. While community forest support projects have tended to focus on capacity building activities, less direct attention has been given to these systemic problems. We conclude that some factors like appropriate leadership, and spending of logging receipts on collective benefits (direct and indirect) are needed to minimize conflicts. Government and development agencies should concentrate efforts on designing concrete tools for improving financial transparency while privileging communities with credible leaders.

The present paper analyses the links between Payments for Environmental Services (PES) and biodiversity conservation in developing countries. We first discuss some of the inherent complexities and uncertainties when linking biodiversity to ecosystem services and the related inconsistencies to deal with ecosystem services monitoring, quantification and biodiversity economic valuation. We then apply such theoretical framework in 11 biodiversity PES field projects to evaluate the impacts on biodiversity conservation and rural development. We find that PES designed for conserving ecosystem biodiversity with no concrete species targeting, require less monitoring and payments are done on a per surface basis. Biodiversity PES projects targeting concrete species require more monitoring and control, and payments are done on a per family basis. These projects have not addressed the polemic of the lack of consistent links between ecosystem functions and biodiversity, and have adopted a practical approach where biodiversity depends on land uses or targets specific species threaten by extinction. We finally suggest some design features to better adjust PES to local needs while coping with forthcoming socio-economic challenges.

Assessing global tendencies and impacts of conditional payments for environmental services (PES) programs is challenging because of their heterogeneity, and scarcity of comparative studies. This meta-study systematizes 55 PES schemes worldwide in a quantitative database. Using categorical principal component analysis to highlight clustering patterns, we reconfirm frequently hypothesized differences between public and private PES schemes, but also identify diverging patterns between commercial and non-commercial private PES vis-à-vis their service focus, area size, and market orientation. When do these PES schemes likely achieve significant environmental additionality? Using binary logistical regression, we find additionality to be positively influenced by three theoretically recommended PES 'best design' features: spatial targeting, payment differentiation, and strong conditionality, alongside some contextual controls (activity paid for and implementation time elapsed). Our results thus stress the preeminence of customized design over operational characteristics when assessing what determines the outcomes of PES implementation.