What’s governance got to do with it? Examining the relationship between governance and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Deforestation continues at rapid rates despite global conservation efforts. Evidence suggests that governance may play a critical role in influencing deforestation, and while a number of studies have demonstrated a clear relationship between national-level governance and deforestation, much remains to be known about the relative importance of subnational governance to deforestation outcomes. With a focus on the Brazilian Amazon, this study aims to understand the relationship between governance and deforestation at the municipal level. Drawing on the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) as a guiding conceptual framework, and incorporating the additional dimension of environmental governance, we identified a wide array of publicly available data sources related to governance indicators that we used to select relevant governance variables. We compiled a dataset of 22 municipal-level governance variables covering the 2005–2018 period for 457 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon. Using an econometric approach, we tested the relationship between governance variables and deforestation rates in a fixed-effects panel regression analysis. We found that municipalities with increasing numbers of agricultural companies tended to have higher rates of deforestation, municipalities with an environmental fund tended to have lower rates of deforestation, and municipalities that had previously elected a female mayor tended to have lower rates of deforestation. These results add to the wider conversation on the role of local-level governance, revealing that certain governance variables may contribute to halting deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.

Impacts of commodity prices and governance on the expansion of tropical agricultural frontiers

“…National level governance indicators cannot capture relevant heterogeneities in vertical governance structures, for example, related to (a) decision-making processes, (b) rules and policies, and (c) enforcement 38 . In fact, national-level governance indicators are likely biased against the agricultural frontier regions, where variation in land cover change is highest 52 . Third, from an application viewpoint, the incomplete region coverage is regrettable.…”

The Key to the Sustainability and Conservation of Extractive Reserves in the Amazon

“…The expansion of new areas also occurs for extensive livestock rearing [126,127]. Moreover, deforestation, economic growth projects, and global warming threaten the maintenance of environmental resources [128]. Solutions to reduce deforestation and burning and improve the quality of life of small producers require investment, increased supervision, and the development of technological and economic alternatives [104].…”

Roads and Deforestation: Do Local Institutions Matter?

“…This is especially serious in Latin America, where despite some attempts made by Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru to implement forest concessions in the Andean Amazon region (Barrantes et al, 2005), an effective forest management remains a crucial challenge for governance (Nolte et al, 2017). To our best knowledge, Bonilla-Mejía and Higuera-Mendieta (2019) and Benzeev et al (2022) are two of the very few studies that highlight the importance of local institutions for forest conservation in the region. However, the former study only examines a very particular mechanism-strict-use PAs-in Colombia and does not address the role of institutions in a comprehensive manner, while the latter study does examine the relationship between certain local-level governance variables and municipal-level deforestation in Brazil but finds no clear relationship between governance and deforestation.…”