Protected Lands and Dependence Networks

• In Event: Policy Networks

Abstract

The protection of natural resources is vital for sustainable economic growth and biodiversity. Recently, environmental protection has increased throughout the world. However, the variance in conservation effort across countries remains large, with many countries failing to meet global standards. We seek to discover to what degree a state’s decision to protect its natural lands is influenced by the conservation efforts of other nations versus domestic factors such as national income and government type. This paper contributes to the literature by testing the relative importance of diffusion versus domestic factors in environmental policy formation. We expect that states are significantly influenced by the policies of other nations who form part of their dependence networks, as explained below. Further, we expect that conservation efforts of wealthy democratic nations will be highest, as democracies are likely to be most influenced by environmental interest groups.
Alarmed by biodiversity declines, state parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity committed in 2010 to conserve more than 17 percent of their land area by giving them protected status by 2020. Recent data suggests that states collectively have made important progress toward that goal but still fall short, with about 14 percent of the Earth’s land having protected status. The average masks wide variation, with several states protecting 17 percent or more of their land area and others protecting less than 1 percent. Moreover, the average does not tell us whether states are protecting ecologically important areas or choosing to protect less-important areas.
Our analysis will seek to identify the characteristics of states associated with the varying levels and quality of protected areas. A couple of biologists have begun to address this question, but this variation has been largely ignored in the social sciences in the past several years. Such neglect is puzzling as state behavior on protected lands may yield insights into state behavior on other environmental issues that are more difficult to measure, especially in comparative context.
We use the most recent 2015 release of the World Database on Protected Areas provided by IUCN and UNEP, which provides a cross-sectional snapshot of the current level of protected area by state. To provide more nuance, we use the Environmental Performance Index biodiversity and habitat data at Yale University. This data weights protected areas by their national and global importance (with the protection of rarer ecosystems receiving greater weights). It also provides time-trend data that we can use to observe the ways changes in other states or within a given state might influence the level of protection. A final level of nuance and robustness is achieved by examining data from Butchart et al., who measure the percentage of critical species habitat that is covered by protected areas in each state.
Theoretically, we argue that states exist internationally in dependence networks with each other and that those networks provide pathways for influence on a state’s environmental choices. For any given state, a dependence network is a set of partner states with whom it regularly engages in exchanges of valued goods, where those exchanges would be costly to break. We measure three dependence networks for any given state by examining that state’s trade partners, alliance partners, and international organization (IO) partners.
We weight partners by their material capabilities (e.g., GDP) in order to capture their differing potential for influence. We expect that changes in a given state’s dependence network will induce changes within that state. In particular, we test the proposition that changes in the level of protected areas among network partners are likely to trigger changes in a given state’s own level of protected areas. A state’s dependence network can change in one of three ways: a state can change its network partners (e.g., by creating a new security alliance); network partners may become more or less important to a state (e.g., by partners increasing or decreasing their military capabilities); and network partners may alter their own level of protection.
We recognize the fundamental importance of choices made by domestic actors in environmental policies and practices. We do not expect dependence networks to have an overwhelming, short-term influence on state environmental policies. We do expect dependence networks to influence a given state’s environmental policies in gradual ways that occur a step at a time, perhaps over many years. Even small alterations can be important because they can then lead others to similar alterations and because they can create incentives or space for domestic groups seeking further change in the level of protected areas.

Authors

• Darren G. Hawkins, Brigham Young University

• Jay Goodliffe, Brigham Young University