Towards a Unified Scheme for Environmental and Social Protection : Learning from PES and CCT Experiences in Developing Countries

Environmental protection and poverty alleviation in the developing world are usually heralded as joint objectives. However, these two goals are often associated with different sectoral policy instruments. While so-called payments for environmental services (PES) are increasingly being promoted for environmental protection, poverty alleviation is increasingly addressed by conditional cash transfers (CCT) program. These instruments although aimed to achieve distinct objectives have a number of similarities and challenges in their design and implementation phases. This paper elaborates on these similarities and develops a unifying generic framework that is used to discuss the extent to which both approaches could be unified.