The national Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programmes of Mexico were originally based on the neoclassical economic theory that conceptualized ecosystems as factories whose various outputs can be quantified and converted to commodities. This model of PES clashed with an alternative theorization, Compensation for Ecosystem Services (CES), with home-grown roots in the ontological orientation and contextualized experience of an epistemic community of public intellectuals with deep engagement in rural Mexico. While built upon the same basic premise — that healthy ecosystems produce services of value — the CES model reimagines payments as compensation for the sustainable stewardship and labour of rural communities and, mediated by the state, as a means to counteract the systemic structural inequities between rural and urban and global North and South. Based on discourse analysis of a series of key actor interviews, longitudinal participant observation and policy analysis, this article explores: 1) the common conceptual underpinnings in the theory of CES, but also the variances; 2) the specific influence of this model on the design of the national PES programmes; and 3) the ways in which this influence has been mediated by politics and shifting relations of power in Mexico.