Table 3.

The challenges in developing and implementing Plan Vivo projects as community-based PES projects as identified from our analysis of Plan Vivo forest projects in Uganda, Mozambique and Malawi.

implementation challenges experienced	causal institutional interaction issues identified	CBNRM design characteristics not fulfilled (from Dolsak & Ostrom [70] design characteristics shown in table 1)
1. Identifying project participants	— weak or absent existing property rights (land tenure)	— rules are devised and managed by resource users
2. Channelling benefits to community	— weak enforcement of community-based management schemes
3. Connections and communications between multi-level institutions/actors	— insufficient existing institutional infrastructure and communications (e.g. from project to extension services, or weak financial services at local level)	— compliance with rules is easy to monitor
4. Following established monitoring procedures	— uncertainties in use of appropriate carbon-monitoring tools	— rules are devised and managed by resource users
5. Securing behavioural change	— participants' perceptions of the project (as having low benefits and high risk) based on limited information of associated livelihood benefits