Problematizing REDD+ as an experiment in payments for ecosystem services

► REDD+ can be conceptualized as the world's largest experiment in payments for ecosystem services. ► REDD+ and PES contribute to shift the logic of conservation from an ethical to a utilitarian ethos. ► They result in procedural and distributive inequities and may crowd-out conservation values in the future. ► An ecological debt fund would be a more ecologically and socially just approach to influence land-use governance.