Clark C. Gibson

Does Privatization Protect Natural Resources? Property Rights and Forests in Guatemala

Objectives. Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of property rights will ensure that users have incentives to manage their resources well. Common property, to the extent it is discussed at all, is seen as leading to the tragedy of the commons. We evaluate these claims by assessing property rights and forest conditions in two private and three communal forests in Guatemala. Methods. Data on biological and social phenomena from five forests (151 plots) and their associated communities were collected using the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program protocols. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze four models. We examined t-scores for differences in coefficients for the different models. Results. The models demonstrate that de jure property rights are not a powerful predictor of variations among the sampled forests. Conclusions. We argue that de facto institutions and their enforcement are much more important than de jure property rights to forest management. Communities holding a forest in common can, under certain circumstances, create institutions to manage their resources as successfully as—or more successfully than—private owners.

The Local Politics of Decentralized Environmental Policy in Guatemala

This article identifies the conditions leading to successful decentralized environmental management in the developing world. It focuses on Guatemala, a country where lawmakers have devolved forest protection to 331 municipalities. This study is based on an original survey of 100 randomly chosen mayors who held office between 1996 and 2000 and a database constructed from several national censuses that include geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and biophysical variables. It suggests that local community pressure and central government support encourage mayors to value forest protection. Survey results also indicate that mayors allocate staff to forest protection when the central government makes this a priority. Mayors also dedicate personnel to this sector when they have more education and when their municipalities boast larger amounts of forested area.

The Politics of Decentralized Natural Resource Governance

more intensely for effective solutions to environmental problems. Various factors conspire to make natural resources difficult to govern well. First, since many larger scale natural resources can be common pool resources, they pose different-and arguably more difficult-challenges to governance than private or public goods. Second, the use of natural resources can produce significant externalities. Third, the complex spatial and temporal boundaries of natural resources along with their potential externalities rarely conform to existing political institutions. Environmental problems often take decades or even centuries to emerge; their solutions may take equally long. Ideas about how to govern natural resources have evolved significantly over the last 30 years. Many perceive centralized, top down approaches as having failed and advocate for more decentralized policies. Two major forms have emerged. The first seeks to devolve property rights over natural resources to local individuals and communities. The second advocates the decentralization of

Voting behavior and electoral irregularities in Kenya's 2013 Election

Data from a unique nationwide exit poll of 6258 voters are employed to explore two central themes of the 2013 Kenyan Election: (1) the correlates of individual vote choice; and (2) the credibility of the electoral process. The analysis reveals several striking relationships between an individuals vote choice, personal attributes, and perceptions of the campaign and candidates. We find that the leading coalitions mostly kept their co-ethnics together, although ethnic alliances proved somewhat less certain than in the past. We find that, for the most part, voters treated Uhuru Kenyatta – not sitting Prime Minister Raila Odinga – as the incumbent. The data show that campaign issues also influenced the vote: Odinga garnered more support on issues related to constitutional implementation, corruption, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), while Kenyatta won on the economy, employment, and security. Exit poll data also reveal irregularities in the electoral process, including some evidence of inflated vote totals benefitting the Jubilee coalition and illegal administrative activities. The data, while not definitive, are highly suggestive of a deeply flawed electoral process and challenge claims that Kenyatta won a majority in the first round.

Decentralization can help reduce deforestation when user groups engage with local government

Significance Decentralization is one of the most important innovations in environmental policy during the past 30 years. Despite the pervasiveness and large amounts of resources invested to implement these reforms, little is known about their environmental effects. Given worldwide interest in forest conservation, this lack of knowledge hampers efforts to improve the effectiveness of current policy initiatives. Using quasi-experimental methods, we find that the environmental effects of decentralization reforms depend on how the reforms affect the conditions for user groups to govern their forests. Our findings show that decentralization to general-purpose governments may be most effective in places where forest users take advantage of opportunities to engage with local politicians about forestry issues. Policy makers around the world tout decentralization as an effective tool in the governance of natural resources. Despite the popularity of these reforms, there is limited scientific evidence on the environmental effects of decentralization, especially in tropical biomes. This study presents evidence on the institutional conditions under which decentralization is likely to be successful in sustaining forests. We draw on common-pool resource theory to argue that the environmental impact of decentralization hinges on the ability of reforms to engage local forest users in the governance of forests. Using matching techniques, we analyze longitudinal field observations on both social and biophysical characteristics in a large number of local government territories in Bolivia (a country with a decentralized forestry policy) and Peru (a country with a much more centralized forestry policy). We find that territories with a decentralized forest governance structure have more stable forest cover, but only when local forest user groups actively engage with the local government officials. We provide evidence in support of a possible causal process behind these results: When user groups engage with the decentralized units, it creates a more enabling environment for effective local governance of forests, including more local government-led forest governance activities, fora for the resolution of forest-related conflicts, intermunicipal cooperation in the forestry sector, and stronger technical capabilities of the local government staff.

Locating Tropical Biodiversity Conservation Amid Weak Institutions

This paper addresses the broad question ofwhere to locate authority for tropical biodiversity conservation considering: (1) community-based natural research management (CBNRM) overreaches the indisputable place of local communities in tropical conservation efforts; (2) the most promise for tropical conservation and development is offered by multiple layers of nested institutions; (3) the greatest challenge for implementation of multiple layer designs is weakness at all levels of existing tropical institutions; and (4) rehabilitating such institutions, facilitating ongoing coordination among them, and introducing new and appropriate institutional designs will require significant international and national policy reorientation and greater commitment of financial and technical assistance.

Improving Electoral Integrity with Information and Communications Technology

Irregularities plague elections in developing democracies. The international community spends hundreds of millions of dollars on election observation, with little robust evidence that it consistently improves electoral integrity. We conducted a randomized control trial to measure the effect of an intervention to detect and deter electoral irregularities employing a nation-wide sample of polling stations in Uganda using scalable information and communications technology (ICT). In treatment stations, researchers delivered letters to polling officials stating that tallies would be photographed using smartphones and compared against official results. Compared to stations with no letters, the letters increased the frequency of posted tallies by polling center managers in compliance with the law; decreased the number of sequential digits found on tallies – a fraud indicator; and decreased the vote share for the incumbent president in some specifications. Our results demonstrate that a cost-effective citizen and ICT intervention can improve electoral integrity in emerging democracies.

Evaluating the Roles of Ethnicity and Performance in African Elections Evidence from an Exit Poll in Kenya

While many scholars argue that ethnicity drives voting behavior in Africa, recent quantitative work finds government performance also matters. But under what conditions do Africans use ethnicity or performance to inform their vote? We argue that the importance of ethnicity and performance is conditional on whether voters evaluate co-ethnics and incumbent candidates. We hypothesize co-ethnic voters will coordinate and form blocs, whereas non-co-ethnics are more likely to divide their support between candidates. We also hypothesize that while incumbent performance matters to all voters independent of ethnicity, citizens will forgive their co-ethnic incumbent’s poor performance. Tests using data from a nationwide exit poll we conducted during Kenya’s 2007 national election strongly support our hypotheses. Our results are robust to analyses concerning the potentially confounding relationship between ethnicity and performance.

Why the salience of social divisions matters in party systems: Testing the interactive hypothesis in South Africa

Scholars have long argued social diversity, and electoral institutions interactively shape party systems: diversity has little effect on the effective number of parties (ENP) in single member plurality (SMP) systems but increases ENP in proportional ones. We argue instead that where diversity is salient enough to generate demand for parties, it also hinders strategic coordination, preventing SMP rules from reducing the number of parties and producing a correlation between diversity and ENP. In contrast, non-salient forms of diversity have little impact regardless of institutional rules. We test this intuition using data from South Africa’s municipal mixed-member system and explore its highly salient racial cleavage and less salient ethnic one. We find racial diversity correlates with ENP in SMP systems while ethnic diversity correlates with ENP in neither SMP nor proportional representation systems. Our study contributes to mounting evidence questioning the interactive hypothesis and points to the importance of the salience of social divisions in shaping party systems.

The Aid Effectiveness Puzzle

Researchers and public officials trying to improve economic performance in the postwar period believed that the core problem of development was the lack of sufficient monetary resources needed to build necessary physical infrastructure and to enhance investment in local economies (see Rostow 1960; Prebisch 1970; Huntington and Weiner 1987). If the problem was one of “missing money,” the proposed solution was to “send money.”