Presenter: Yifan (Flora) He is an environmental politics scholar and an assistant professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Her research examines land and natural resource governance in Latin America. She combines causal inference methods, geospatial and remote sensing data, and qualitative interviews to advance knowledge in three areas: the distributive politics of environmental policy implementation; the social consequences of environmental degradation; and global conservation policy.
Abstract: The common-pool resources (CPR) governance literature predicts that clearly defined resource boundaries and community consensus on resource use rules will promote sustainable resource governance. However, empirical evidence directly testing this hypothesis is scarce. We investigate how individual-level beliefs and community-level consensus on a territory’s land use are associated with forest conservation using original survey and participatory mapping data from 70 Indigenous communities in the San Martín region of Peru. We conducted an innovative mapping exercise in which participants mapped the permissible land use across their territory. We calculate the grid-level average consensus on land use and estimate how disagreement impacts deforestation using a logit model. Our results reveal that areas with higher consensus on forest conservation designation exhibit significantly lower deforestation rates. We complement this empirical analysis with survey data on participants’ characteristics to discuss the potential drivers of land-use consensus. Our findings highlight how individual-level consensus mediates community governance and conservation outcomes.