Community Forest Management, Electoral Incentives, and Local Forest Loss

• In Event: Local and Community Governance of Environmental Policy

Abstract

This paper presents and tests a theory that links variations in deforestation rates in areas under Community-Based Forestry (CBF) to differential electoral incentives for local politicians. CBF includes a variety of democratization approaches that incorporate representatives of local communities and small landholders into forest management and use decisions traditionally made by government bureaucrats or individuals with limited input from the local community. The practice of community-based forestry has expanded due in part by the endorsement of CBF by the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD Programme), supported by the work of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations with many developing countries. This expansion in the adoption of CBF has occurred despite the FAO’s assessment that ‘reports about the effectiveness of the management have been mixed’ and that ‘reliable data on CBF effectiveness are limited’ (FAO 2016). This theory postulates that the success of the CBF to reduce deforestation is affected by two election-related factors: the opportunity that local elected officials have to capture forest resources for political purposes and the need that elected official face to generate rent for political supporters. The area in which we test these hypothesized links is Northeast India, which is rich in both forest resources as well as in the diversity of forms of local government structures that exist. The analysis shows that variations in the structure and context of local government are associated significantly with variations in local deforestation rates. These variations are consistent with the four hypothesized relationships that link higher levels of opportunity and need for local politicians to extract rents with higher rates of local deforestation.

Authors

• Jonathan Parker Darsey, Georgia Institute of Technology--Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

• Anjali Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology