Grassland conservation and environmental inequality in Inner Mongolia, China

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) schemes have become a widely used policy instrument for states to incentivize desirable environmental behaviors to meet conservation and preservation goals. However, many studies have shown that market-based regulatory mechanisms may change human-environment relationships, generating the commodification of natural resources and environmental inequalities. Our case study of an extensive grassland PES scheme in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China demonstrates that implementation is highly contingent upon existing state structures, political ideologies, national economic imperatives, and the ability of PES designers to account for the complexity of human-environment interactions. The state's conflicting mandates to provide environmental protection and facilitate economic growth have undermined conservation and worsened environmental inequality in the region. Our chapter contributes a more nuanced understanding of how normative functions of state-led ecosystem valuation and environmental interventions in an illiberal context may lead to the overutilization of natural resources that exacerbates stratification and injustice in top-down, centralized environmental governance models.