Local Self-Governance of Forests in Bolivia: Why Do Some Communities Enjoy Better Forests than Others?

Abstract

"Scholarship on local forest governance has shown that a tragedy of the commons may be averted through the self-organization of natural resource users. User groups do not always succeed in self-governance, however, and recent empirical work suggests that the likelihood for successful collective outcomes varies with the strength of the local arrangements for compliance monitoring. We argue that the recent empirical focus on local monitoring may have overshadowed other theoretically important aspects of self-governance, such as rule making and sanctioning. We test this argument with data from personal interviews as well as satellite imagery for a representative sample of 200 communities in rural Bolivia. Our analysis shows that self-organized monitoring is often an important influence on the performance of local resource governance arrangements, but community rule making and sanctioning are often at least as influential."