Between the Global Commodity Boom and Subnational State Capacities: Payment for Environmental Services to Fight Deforestation in Argentina

Abstract

Does subnational state capacity stop deforestation? The commodity boom of the 2000s significantly expanded the agriculture frontier in most provinces of Argentina, with devastating effects on native forests. Interestingly, some of the subnational governments that presided over the commodities supercycle also sought to reform the forestry sector to reduce rampant deforestation, despite promoting and benefiting from agricultural expansion. A national program to protect native forests through payment for environmental services (PES) was created to be implemented in local districts. We argue that the success of new forest protections is contingent on the capacity of subnational governments to implement the law. In our study, we find that changes in provincial deforestation rates are explained by the interaction of state capacity, on one hand, and high land prices driven by commodity pressures, on the other. Our research carries implications for students and practitioners of forest PES. Our findings underscore the fundamental role subnational state governments play in climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The Policy of Ecological Forest Rangers (EFRs) for the Poor: Goal Positioning and Realistic Choices—Evidence from the Re-Employment Behavior of EFRs in Sichuan, China

“…Regarding the poverty population ecological forestry policy (PPEFP), some researchers interpret this policy as "a temporary employment assistance policy" (improve livelihood) whose main goal is to reduce poverty [25]. PESs can achieve the consistency of multiple goals due to the intersection of regional characteristics, but there are also some PESs designs that do not conform to regional geographic and human characteristics [50], imperfect supervision or system implementation deviations under asymmetric information [22], and the multi-level principal-agent problem [45] bring conflicts between goals and practices. This discussion shows that the enforcement of PESs in different times and spaces has multiple goals, and differences may arise based on the historical background of the policies.…”

“…On the contrary, some studies have pointed out that PESs did not meet the established goals and failed to achieve the synergy of "poverty reduction and environmental protection" goals [25,39,43]. The main influencing factors for the failure of PESs to achieve the established goals or the conflict between goals and practice include unreasonable policy and system design, poor property rights [25,49], insufficient multi-level agency supervision [25,45], government system or law enforcement is not strict [22,46], and local government or community participation is insufficient [25,[45][46][47].…”

“…The existing literature mainly focuses mainly on the payments for environmental services (PES) project system design [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], target positioning [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28], implementation effect evaluation [21,24,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42], the consistency of the target and behavior [26,39,[42][43][44], and the factors that affect target deviation [22,26,39,[45][46]…”

“…As a result of this neglect, a logical understanding of the enforcement of ecological compensation policies is lacking. In addition, some studies have proposed the influence of administrative power or political and social background on the enforcement behavior and the effect of ecological compensation policies [22,27,[45][46][47][48][49], but these studies failed to propose a good analytical framework, and they did not select the characteristics of the goal audience based on "re-employment" behavior to verify policy goal positioning and the differences with regard to realistic choices.…”

Collaborative Governance Networks: A Case Study of Argentina’s Forest Law

“…From 2011 onwards, there has been intense scientific debate about the setup of the forest law and the effectiveness of various implementation regulations found in the provinces of the Gran Chaco ecoregion [18][19][20][21]. A large coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and members of the federal parliament advocating for the preservation of native forests was instrumental both in the law's adoption and in creating a fund to provide payments for ecosystem services [22].…”