Johannes Christian Haas

Master´s Thesis Title: Fairness in conservation? Contextual and distributive equity in Vietnam´s Payment for Forest Environmental Services-Program

In current times of globalized efforts to limit climate change and global warming, environmental policies of all forms have gained relevance on the agendas of policy makers on various levels. Furthermore, scientific analyses of environmental policy approaches get ever more important for the targeted design of effective programs and projects attempting to govern issues related to the environment. The challenge of halting deforestation and forest degradation processes remains pressing in the light of nearly unrestrained deforestation rates in countries of the global South. As potential answer to this challenge as well as innovative approach to nature conservation in general, market-based approaches of conservation have evolved as an increasingly popular idea in environmental politics. More specifically, providers of ecosystem services (ES) are to be offset for their foregone benefits resulting from conserving ecosystems from land-use in the form of financial compensations provided by the users of these ES. Mechanisms providing payments for ecosystem services (PES) on a local or national scale apply the idea in the most direct way.

The master´s thesis project at hand is examining this new kind of incentive-based consercation policies with regard to locally perceived justice in distribution of costs and benefits of such interventions. Using the empirical equity debate as theoretical framework, questions of justice and the impact of historical and social settings on allocation outcomes are analysed by means of studying the Vietnamese Payments for Forest Environmental (PFES) framework, a landmark policy in Asia as well as globally.

Johannes Christian Haas is studying Natural Resource Management, Political Science and Geography in Munich and Bremen, Germany, as well as in Bergen, Norway. His major research interests lie in practical strategies for sustainable forest management in the global south, in conflict-sensitive and culturally inclusive policies for nature conservation, and in climate adaption approaches. Apart from his academic activities, Johannes Haas gained hands-on experience in international cooperation in Germany as well as abroad and gathered regional expertise of Ethiopia, Pakistan and Vietnam.