Intermediary roles and payments for ecosystem services: A typology and program feasibility application in Panama

Intermediaries in payments for ecosystem services (PES) play diverse roles in facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers. From the literature, we identified major roles including information exchange; program design; networking, representation, and mediation; and administration and project coordination; and we evaluated these roles alongside crosscutting institutional factors of influence, process, and context. We applied this typology to a Western Panama case study informing PES feasibility using semi-structured interviews with 34 intermediary organizations to understand current and potential future PES roles, capacity, and connections. We found broad capacity to perform intermediary roles and ways in which the limitations of one organization (or sector) could be compensated for by another organization (sector) through partnerships. The strongest organization-to-organization connections were found between the civil and public sectors working at the local and regional scales, and between intermediaries overall and “supply-side” landowners. While beneficial, these connections highlight the need to ensure that the interests of weakly connected actors, particularly potential buyers, are adequately represented; furthermore, uncertain central government support may affect program development at the regional scale. Our study advances a more synthetic understanding of the intermediary actor landscape in relation to PES institutional analysis, which can inform future project-specific and theoretical analyses.