Abstract
Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are increasingly popular market driven conservation strategies which involve a willing buyer and willing provider of ecosystem services coming together for mutual benefits through market or market-like mechanisms. My thesis critiques Wunder's 5 point definition of PES, and argue that it pushes PES towards a purely market end of the spectrum while ignoring the actual reality of PES cases that involve significant government support. I demonstrate this by conducting a meta-analysis of a robust sample of PES case studies. I conceptually draw upon three intellectual strands namely, Manno's commoditization, Marxian commodity fetishism and Polanyian theories of fictitious commodities to demonstrate that ecosystem services function poorly in market mechanisms with little or no institutional support from governments, socio-political discursive practices, and multiple social actors. I then recommend a re-evaluation of Wunder's five point definition of PES, since it is canonical and influential in the PES literature.