"Decentralisation and Forest Conservation: Evidence from India"

• In Event: Democratic Politics, Development, and the Environment

Abstract

Natural resource management decision-making has been decentralised significantly in the developing world, despite theoretical ambiguity in whether such a move would improve preservation or accelerate depletion. Using a difference-in-differences design, we study the effects of the
staggered implementation of a 1996 law that implemented elected local government councils in
Scheduled Areas in 8 states in India on deforestation rates as measured using remote-sensing
data. We find that the extension caused a large decrease in the rate of deforestation, and find
suggestive evidence that these effects are concentrated in areas with greater mining potential,
and where ethnic groups with strong resource-preservation norms are an electoral plurality. Our
findings suggest that devolution of political power to local communities that can also enforce sustainable resource-use norms can appreciably aid the preservation of forest ecosystems, even in
areas where state capacity is weak.

Authors

• Apoorva Lal, Stanford University

• Saad Gulzar, Stanford University

• Benjamin Pasquale, University of Southern California