Tenure Brief: Designing Pro-poor Rewards for Ecosystem Services: Lessons from the United States?

The United States has experimented with its version of rewards for ecosystem services for close to 80 years. In general, market forces are used to reward land users for protecting the environment. This brief – which was published by the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the USAID TransLinks Program – examines the US experience and investigates if the lessons can be adapted to tenure regimes in the developing world.