In recent years, awareness of ecosystem ‘services’ to human society has increased significantly. With it, economic tools for their conservation have gained attention in international environmental governance discourses, including in the global water discourse. The present paper uses a discourse analytical approach to trace how payments for ecosystem services are increasingly mainstreamed into the discourse on integrated water resource management (IWRM). Notably, international organizations with an environmental or conservation mandate draw on the environmental principle of the IWRM paradigm to raise concern for water‐related ecosystem services, and on the notion of water as an economic good to suggest payments for their conservation. While some actors and practices of the IWRM discourse have endorsed the extended storyline, it has been received reluctantly by most of the central actors in the global water platform. The Green Economy discourse spurred by the Rio + 20 conference has given the mainstreaming process a new dynamic. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment