Incentive schemes and payments for ecosystem services attract increasing attention as a means for aligning the interests of landowners and society by remunerating forest owners for the goods and services their forests produce. As incentive schemes expand around the world, questions related to their institutional dimensions, as well as the role of different actors and existing institutions in their initiation, design and implementation, arise. This paper seeks to gain an understanding of these issues by analysing a number of voluntary
incentive schemes currently implemented in Denmark, Finland, Spain and Italy. The analysed schemes are predominantly aimed at enhancing biodiversity and improving recreation. One of the schemes is also related to preserving a variety of forest ecosystem services from forest fires. The incentive schemes are studied following a framework for the institutional analysis of PES developed by Prokofieva and Gorriz (Prokofieva, I. and Gorriz, E. 2013: Institutional analysis of incentives for the provision of forest goods and services: an assessment of incentive schemes in Catalonia (North-East Spain), Forest Policy and Economics, 37, 104-114.). We focus on actor and institutional interactions and outcomes that are likely to result from schemes implementation to draw conclusions regarding the factors that influence the success and the durability of these schemes. Our results show that the nature of the actors initiating the schemes has a paramount effect on their design and performance. Actors’ networking capacity, consensus regarding the problem and its solution, and concordance of values are important determinants of schemes’ success. Existing institutions (both at local and at an international level) on the one hand provide support for the new schemes, but on the other hand can also constraint their design and limit their applicability and
implementation potential. Lack of integration with other sectoral policies creates tensions and weakens the performance of some schemes. The environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency and additionality of many schemes are highly questionable, although in some cases can be solvable by redesigning the schemes. Despite these serious shortcomings, in overall the experience with the
schemes is perceived as positive with space for improvements. Yet, coordinated effort among actors at different levels is required to increase the overall governance quality of the incentive schemes.