Abstract Groundwater is a largely unseen common pool resource. Yet, driven by strong economic incentives, whether or not encouraged existing policies, and the difficulty to exclude others, groundwater users are competing with each other extract as much possible, devastating consequences for its sustainability. The challenges faced sustainably managing such resources, on which people have establ...

Recent decades have witnessed an increased development of schemes for payment watershed ecosystem services (PWES). However, the public is usually excluded from PWES systems. Reliable and empirical research on perspective scarce. Aiming to understand perceptions, attitudes, participation, responses PWES, this paper investigated local residents living in Yongding River area through a face-to-face...