Working Together: A Governance Perspective of Payments for Water-Based Ecosystem Services Collaboratives

As states and regions continue to face challenges related to watershed conservation, watershed stakeholders have become more dependent on collaborative partnerships to solve complex water conservation and environmental problems. These collaborative partnerships often include programs of payments for water-based ecosystem services (PWES). PWES’s are arrangements funded by government or private parties where benefits are offered to ecosystem services providers in exchange for their work on protecting the watershed environment. This paper explores collaborative partnerships of PWES’s in the United States with an emphasis on determining the types of governance structures used by the collaboratives. The study finds that PWES’s primarily engage in interagency and cross-sector governance practices, and less so with grassroots governance practices. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of collaborative partnerships of these programs through the lens of governance structure will enhance local and regional organizations’ abilities to provide the best approach for addressing a particular watershed goal.