Regulatory transition and forest-related outcomes in the Global South

Erbaugh James T, Hanover NH

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Political Science program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Drs. Richard Howarth and Michael Cox at Dartmouth College, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating regulatory transitions and forest management outcomes in the Global South. Canonical research concludes that self-organized groups can generate norms and rules (i.e. institutions) that enable the sustainable management of forest areas. To promote forest conservation, many governments across the Global South have rapidly decentralized forest management. As a result, these same governments have witnessed a rapid rise in the number of administrative units that conduct regulatory activities. Despite these processes of decentralization and administrative proliferation in the Global South, forest loss continues to increase. The relationship between regulatory transition and institutional stability provides an important link between the theory of how self-organized user-groups have managed forest resources for long-term sustainability and the current trends of increased decentralization and forest cover loss in the Global South. Regulatory transition refers to a period during which rules, regulations, or administrations change. Behavioral uncertainty often increases during regulatory transition, which can lead to outcomes that may differ drastically from periods of institutional stability. Through the study of how regulatory transition affects forest outcomes in the Global South, this research advances fundamental research in social, economic, and behavioral sciences. This research investigates the extent of regulatory transition and its impact on forest related outcomes across scales. First, it utilizes publicly available, global datasets to quantify the extent of forest cover in the Global South that experienced different forms of regulatory transition over the past two decades (2000 to 2020). This analysis will assess the years during which forest management was decentralized, and the extent to which sub-national administrative units have proliferated. Second, this research will analyze the impact of regulatory transition on forest cover and multidimensional poverty. This analysis will use panel data and causal inference techniques to understand how regulatory transition affects forest cover. Third, this research will assess the causal mechanisms by which regulatory transition affects forest outcomes through the collection and analysis of interview data. Decentralization and proliferation provide a unique opportunity to understand how and why forest cover change has occurred as a result of regulatory transition in one of the most important countries for tropical forest conservation. The combination of these three analyses will provide a comprehensive study of when, how, and why regulatory transition leads to changes in forest resources. In doing so, it promises to advance scholarship on institutional analysis and natural resource policy and behavior. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.