Makers and shapers of environmental policy making: Power and participation in forest legislation in Bolivia

Elitism in Policy Planning on Village Government

“…Participation has been widely studied, related to issues such as development, project planning, community-based initiatives, policy making, governance and implementation. Participation can improve the quality of policy/science, based on the knowledge and experience of the actors involved [12].…”

Becoming fundable? Converting climate justice claims into climate finance in Mesoamerica’s forests

“…Authors suggest different motivations for the need to define more just benefit-sharing mechanisms. In some cases, they theorize that distributions perceived as fairer will result in more effective outcomes, while in others, justice is a goal in and of itself based on ideas about human rights and ethical fairness (Schroeder and McDermott 2014;Hirsch 2017). Luttrell et al (2013) provide one of the clearest outlines of different rationales for what might constitute a fair distribution of REDD+ benefits based on: legal rights to land targeted for a project or intervention, the provision of results in the form of concrete emissions reductions, effective stewardship of forest resources over time, compensation for costs accrued or other rents lost, facilitation of effective action, and needs (or a "pro-poor" approach).…”

“…The forms that distribution of funding and benefits take under the UNFCCC will inevitably relate to who has a say in designing institutions for REDD+ governance. As such, many efforts to define climate justice have also focused on procedural justice as an important lens through which to assess questions of equity (Suiseeya and Caplow 2013;Taylor 2015;Aguilar-Støen 2015;Hirsch 2017;Myers et al 2018). Procedural justice, put simply, "is about who makes decisions, and how" (Martin 2013, p. 98); however, determining what might constitute procedural justice is more complicated than such a simple definition might suggest given differences in power between actors (whether between states, between government agencies and forest communities, or between community members) as well as across scales of policymaking and program design (Aguilar-Støen 2017; Myers et al 2018).…”

Forest management in Bolivia under Evo Morales: The challenges of post-neoliberalism

“…However, a series of presidential decrees was adopted in 2016 to develop three main lines of action: the strengthening of communitarian forestry through technical support and public procurement of communitarian forest production, the creation of a public investment fund for the whole sector, and the control of deforestation in order to carry through a reforestation program. These measures mainly came in response to pressure on the government from peasant and indigenous organizations, arguing for greater protection of local communities against the corporate sector (Hirsch, 2017). They nevertheless also reflected the government's ambition to develop a sector that provides a small contribution to the national GDP (3% in 2016) and accounts for only a minor part of Bolivian exports (0.7% in 2016 compared to 2.6% in 2007) (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, 2017) owing to competition from Brazilian wood products.…”

“…Most of these publications deal with the problematic deployment of 1990 forestry reforms up to the present day (Cronkleton, 2014;Cronkleton, Pacheco, Ibargüen, & Albornoz, 2009;Pacheco, Barry, Cronkleton, & Larson, 2012;Pacheco, de Jong, & Johnson, 2010a, 2010bPacheco & Benatti, 2015;Pellegrini, 2011), with the measuring of the extent of deforestation (Müller, Pacheco, & Montero, 2014;Müller, Pistorius, Rohde, Gerold, & Pacheco, 2013) and with the weight of the different factors that determines it: property rights regime, political process of land distribution (Bottazzi & Dao, 2013), accessibility and ethnicity (Boillat et al, 2015). Hirsch (2017) recently described the difficulties concerning the advent of a new forestry scheme but without dealing explicitly with its causes. We propose to take the analysis a few steps further by giving a precise description of the processes involved in the construction of this paradoxical, not quite postneoliberal, model of governance.…”