Glenn Wright

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.

Non-Governmental Organizations, Rural Communities and Forests: A Comparative Analysis of Community-NGO Interactions

Scholars, policy-makers and advocates have, in the last decade, recommended greater involvement by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in community forest management in developing countries. Behind these recommendations lies a notion that NGOs are a sound complement to formal governments and that NGOs can improve communities’ abilities to manage their own forests. There is limited empirical work, however, testing how NGO activity affects local forest governance and deforestation. This paper reports the results of quantitative statistical tests on the effects of local NGO importance—as measured by local forest users’ reports of NGO importance—on deforestation in a sample of 200 rural Bolivian communities. In addition, it examines the effect of NGO importance on community forestry institutions—specifically, the presence of institutions for rule-making, forest monitoring, sanctioning, and enforcement of rules. Contrary to earlier research, these results suggest that NGOs have no discernible effect on community forestry institutions, though other external actors—most notably, municipal governments—seem to have a positive effect. The paper also reports a negative correlation of NGO importance on deforestation. Although these quantitative results are in part supported by qualitative field observations in selected Bolivian communities, care is needed in drawing generalized causal inferences from this evidence.

Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a popular strategy for environmental protection, and tropical forest conservation in particular. Little is known, however, about their effectiveness. Many argue that even if PES increase conservation while payments last, they may adversely affect other motivations for pro-environmental behaviour in the longer term. We test whether conditional payments also encourage forest users to conserve shared forest resources after payments end. Using a framed field experiment with 1,200 tropical forest users in five countries, we show that (1) during the intervention, conditional payments increased conservation behaviour; (2) after payments stopped, users continued to conserve more on average than they did before the intervention, especially when they were able to communicate with each other; and (3) trust amplified the lasting conservation effects of the interventions. PES effectiveness may increase when interventions facilitate interpersonal communication and when implemented in contexts where forest users enjoy high levels of trust.A framed field experiment in five countries shows that Payments for Ecosystem Services increase forest conservation, that communication contributes to payment effectiveness and that positive effects outlast payments.