Participation, Legitimacy, and Effective Conservation: Evidence from Brazil

• In Event: Influence of Public Trust on Environmental Policy

Abstract

Are sustainable development projects more likely to succeed when locals participate in their planning and implementation? If so, why? Despite accumulating evidence that participatory efforts can be moderately more successful, our understanding of the mechanisms linking participation and project effectiveness remains limited. Many scholars suggest that participation helps— at least in part— by providing various immaterial benefits that contribute towards local perceptions of an intervention’s overall “legitimacy.” Following traditions in political philosophy, I define legitimacy as the congruence between (1) a policy intervention’s goals and strategies, and (2) the expectations and priorities of the affected community. By presumption, legitimate projects are more likely to see local compliance and therefore more likely to succeed. Although that argument is straightforward, there is little available evidence from real-world policy efforts to underline its practical significance. Indeed, there is also some potentially compelling counter-evidence. I contribute to the literature by collecting data on sustainable development efforts in the Brazilian Amazon associated with the international conservation regime REDD+. I operationalize effectiveness as a project’s ability to slow forest loss rates in its target area. Using recent extensions of the increasingly prominent synthetic control strategy, I then compare the value-added of participation across settings where legitimacy-building should be easier or more difficult. By exploring whether participation has a stronger effect in cases that are more conducive to legitimacy-building, I provide evidence that helps answer a difficult question in development studies. In sum, this research suggests that to make sense of the mixed case-study record on participatory development, we must note the inconsistent efforts of developers to establish their work’s legitimacy, and we must also be wary that factors like a history of failed interventions can undermine the success of well-intentioned efforts in the future.

Author

• William Schultz, Florida State University