Payments for ecosystem services and the gift paradigm: Sharing the burden and joy of environmental care

In response to the limited success of command-and-control interventions to ensure environmental stewardship, policy makers and practitioners have turned to financial payments to incentivize conservation. Many scholars and practitioners, including ecological economists, have cautioned that market-based approaches might modify human ways of relating to nature that are counterproductive to long-term conservation goals. Moving beyond critique, this article invites attention to the reconceptualization of environmental care labor and human–environment relations using the ideas of gift, reciprocity, and affect. Using the case of forest conservation by rural communities in Odisha, India, I discuss how the paradigm of the gift helps us to rethink transactions in ecosystem services, which might lead to more equitable and empowering ways of sharing of the burden and joy of environmental care. I argue that instead of framing conservation as a burdensome activity that entails sacrifice and costs alone, we need to pay attention to the joyful and life-affirming aspects of conservation care labor and its transformative potential.