Decentralized Collaborative Institutions and Environmental Public Goods: Evidence from Longleaf Pine Restoration

• In Event: Collaborative Governance and Institutional Design

Abstract

Environmental public goods in fragmented private landscapes are chronically underprovided due to spatial coordination failures. Forest resilience, wildfire mitigation, and biodiversity conservation require action across property boundaries, yet private landowners face primarily private returns and bear costs that neighbors' inaction can render futile. This paper evaluates whether voluntary, decentralized collaborative institutions can resolve this coordination problem, drawing on the case of Local Implementation Teams (LITs) established under America's Longleaf Restoration Initiative to restore fire-adapted longleaf pine ecosystems across the southeastern United States.

LITs are geographically defined multi-stakeholder bodies bringing together private landowners, state and federal agencies, NGOs, and forestry industry actors. They hold no regulatory authority. Instead, they reduce coordination costs by facilitating prescribed fire across ownership boundaries, pooling technical expertise, aligning cost-share access, and coordinating landowner expectations. Beginning in 2009 and continuing through 2018, LITs were rolled out across distinct Significant Geographic Areas with sharp spatial boundaries and staggered establishment dates—features that enable credible causal identification.

We construct a high-resolution panel dataset from 2001 to 2025 at the 5-by-5 kilometer grid-cell level, integrating LIT boundaries, state prescribed burn records, U.S. Forest Service TreeMap forest composition, NLCD land cover transitions, and eBird biodiversity observations. Our identification strategy combines two complementary approaches: a spatial regression discontinuity design comparing grid cells just inside and outside LIT boundaries, and a staggered difference-in-differences design using heterogeneity-robust estimators (Callaway and Sant'Anna 2021; Sun and Abraham 2021) applied to a county-by-year panel.

We find that LIT establishment produces a measurable first-stage increase in prescribed burning within five years, followed by gains in longleaf forest share and slower-emerging increases in avian species richness. Effects are concentrated in areas with high private-ownership share and low baseline burn activity—consistent with a coordination-failure interpretation in which institutions tip landscapes from low-burn to high-burn equilibria. Pre-trends are flat, and placebo border tests do not reveal comparable discontinuities. A cost-effectiveness analysis incorporating institutional expenditures, carbon retention, and wildfire risk reduction implies positive net social benefits and an implied cost per ton of CO₂ below prevailing market benchmarks.

The findings speak to a central policy question: can decentralized, voluntary governance achieve landscape-scale environmental outcomes in predominantly private-property regimes where direct regulation is politically or legally constrained? Our evidence suggests that polycentric institutions that lower coordination costs—without mandating behavior—can materially shift the provision of environmental public goods. As climate change intensifies wildfire risk and biodiversity loss, these results support a scalable institutional model for aligning private incentives with landscape-scale resilience, with implications for federal conservation initiatives, state forestry programs, and emerging carbon and ecosystem-service markets.

Author

• Junying Tong, Indiana University
  Presenting Author