Craig M. Kauffman

Assessing the impact of international conservation aid on deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa

International conservation donors have spent at least

The evolution of water trust funds in Ecuador

3.4 billion to protect biodiversity and stem tropical deforestation in Africa since the early 1990s. Despite more than two decades of experience, however, there is little research on the effect of this aid at a region-wide scale. Numerous case studies exist, but show mixed results. Existing research is usually based on community perception or focused on short-term donor objectives rather than specific conservation outcomes, like deforestation rates. Thus, the impact of billions of dollars of conservation aid on deforestation rates remains an open question. This article uses an original dataset to analyze the effect of international conservation aid on deforestation rates in 42 African countries between 2000 and 2013. We first describe patterns of conservation aid across the continent and then assess its impact (with one to five-year lags), controlling for other factors that may also affect deforestation, including rural population, protected areas (PAs), governance, and other economic and commodity production variables. We find that conservation aid is associated with higher rates of forest loss after one- or two-year lags. A similar result holds for PA extent, suggesting possible displacement of deforestation from PAs. However, governance quality in high forest cover countries moderates these effects such that deforestation rates are reduced. Rural population is the most consistent factor associated with forest loss, confirming previous studies of this driver. Our results suggest that in heavily forested countries, development projects designed to support conservation work initially in conditions of good governance, but that conservation aid alone is insufficient to mitigate larger deforestation drivers.

Constructing Rights of Nature Norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand

In early 2000 the city of Quito, Ecuador, established the Water Protection Fund (FONAG) to provide sustainable financing for the management and conservation of surrounding watersheds. FONAG was innovative in that it pioneered the use of trust funds in a voluntary, decentralized mechanism for financing watershed conservation. Since then, at least 15 similar water funds have been created or are under development in the Northern Andes, seven of which are in Ecuador. Ecuador’s later water funds share many similarities with FONAG, but there are also important differences. This paper analyzes the evolution of Ecuador’s water trust funds since the creation of FONAG and related changes in community-level watershed management. It does so by comparing the development and effects-todate of two of the most-recent Ecuadorian water funds: the Fund for Paramo Management and Fight Against Poverty in Tungurahua (FMPLPT) and the Regional Water Fund (FORAGUA). After defining the water trust fund model, the paper provides an overview of the FMPLPT and FORAGUA. It then compares these newer funds with FONAG to identify several trends in the financing of watershed conservation within Ecuador.

Pursuing Costly Reform: The Case of Ecuadorian Natural Resource Management

Governments around the world are adopting laws granting Nature rights. Despite expressing common meta-norms transmitted through transnational networks, rights of Nature (RoN) laws differ in how they answer key normative questions, including how to define rights-bearing Nature, what rights to recognize, and who, if anyone, should be responsible for protecting Nature. To explain this puzzle, we compare RoN laws in three of the first countries to adopt such laws: Ecuador, the US, and New Zealand. We present a framework for analyzing RoN laws along two conceptual axes (scope and strength), highlighting how they answer normative questions differently. The article then shows how these differences resulted from the unique conditions and processes of contestation out of which each law emerged. The article contributes to the literature on norm construction by showing how RoN meta-norms circulating globally are infused with differing content as they are put into practice in different contexts, setting the stage for international norm contestation.

Book Review: Hadden, Jennifer. 2015. Networks in Contention: The Divisive Power of Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press

Why do politicians undertake costly reform? Though reform is never likely, according to received theories (based predominantly on Western democratic models) various electoral “accountability mechanisms” are what provide incentives for politicians to pursue improvements in public policy. Recent scholarship notes, however, that such incentives are often absent in developing countries that lack propitious political institutions such as credible parties (Keefer 2007) or a competitive party system (Tsai 2007). To better understand the incentives for reform in such states we constructed a comprehensive dataset of local attempts to reform natural resource management policy in Ecuador’s 221 cantons during 1997-2008. We find that the following political factors increased the incidence of reform attempts: (1) the presence of “organic” local parties, (2) legitimate participatory decision-making institutions, and (3) the incumbent’s electoral security at the advent of the reform era. We also find that assistance from transnational advocacy networks is a significant positive predictor of local reform attempts.

Scaling up Buen Vivir: Globalizing Local Environmental Governance from Ecuador

The 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was marked by an unprecedented level of contentious action by civil society activists. Conference organizers consequently increased restrictions on all civil society participation. This frustrated activists who favored working within the UN process to influence global climate policy. Jennifer Hadden’s Networks in Contention examines the internal politics of the transnational climate change network, both before and during the Copenhagen conference, to understand why Copenhagen was so contentious, why some organizations adopted contention and others did not, and how changes in the network and members’ tactics influenced climate politics. The book contributes to the ample literature on transnational activist networks by opening the proverbial “black box” of the transnational climate change network and revealing its internal struggles, divisions, and decisionmaking processes. Hadden’s central argument is that the structure of transnational networks (i.e., the relations among network members) influences the way the networks perform, and therefore their ability to influence policy. When it comes to explaining organizational decisions, she argues that “network ties can be more important than [organizational] attributes” (p. 87). Such ties can even mediate the incentives produced by political opportunity structures. This observation does not mean that political opportunity structures and organizational attributes are irrelevant. Hadden credits changing political opportunities with the dramatic increase in the number and diversity of civil society groups working on climate change at the 2009 Copenhagen conference. Particularly important was the addition of organizations from the global justice movement, which had a long history with contentious action. Hadden’s main focus, however, is on how these changes affected the structure of the transnational climate change network and the implications for civil society organizations’ ability to influence global climate policy. One might expect the additional resources and expertise brought by new civil society participants to translate into increased influence. Hadden skillfully uses social network analysis to explain why the increase in network size nevertheless decreased the climate change network’s overall connectivity, and thus members’ ability to impact climate change policy. The cliques that formed rarely