UCLA

The protection of ecosystems is one of the most effective strategies to address multiple environmental issues, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Moreover, these territories provide fundamental ecological services and represent the livelihoods for millions around the world. Hence, their conservation is fundamental to realize key development goals.

Scholars in the social sciences have long studied the economic and societal drivers of environmental degradation, particularly deforestation. According to an influential strand of research, led by the work of Elinor Ostrom, local users of common-pool resources are sometimes able to effectively steward their natural resources without the intervention of states or markets. The presence of adequate mechanisms of governance, for example norms of resource use, devices to monitor and sanction behavior, and autonomy in local decision-making, are essential to explain why some of these groups are more successful than others.

In my dissertation, I study the case of Mexico to shed light on the relevance of different institutional and environmental factors in the ability of local communities to steward their natural resources. Mexico offers an ideal setting to study these questions for two reasons. First, rural communities own most of the country’s land, including the majority of its ecosystems. Moreover, over the last three decades, the rural areas of Mexico have experienced a series of political and economic transformations that have impacted these communities.

In the first chapter, I find that rural communities with long-standing indigenous political institutions experience lower levels of environmental degradation—measured with the average rate of tree cover loss—than those without them; the presence of higher levels of collective action is a possible mechanism for this relationship. However, in the second part of the chapter, I show, leveraging a natural experiment in Mexico, that political reforms aiming to politically recognize these institutions may not be effective at improving communities’ ability to steward their natural resources, particularly forests.

In the second chapter, I explore the role of reforms to increase the territorial autonomy of rural communities through the provision of certified land titles. I show that a policy that provided both public and private land rights to these communities in the 1990s and early 2000s (the PROCEDE) was associated with higher rates of tree cover loss in the years leading to it, mostly among communities without long-standing indigenous institutions and with scarcity of arable land for agriculture. These findings suggest that land reforms that offer private goods in communal settings may affect intra-community political dynamics and, therefore, have mixed impacts on the protection of the forested commons.

Finally, in the last chapter I study how external actors impact communities’ livelihoods. Specifically, I analyze the impacts of exposure to mining concessions on a wide array of community-based outcomes. The mining industry has expanded considerably in Mexico since the early 1990s, affecting hundreds of communities in the process. The results of this chapter show that exposure to these concessions is associated, in the short-run, with a decrease in the levels of economic activity; in the long-run, extractive industries lead to a higher demand for private goods (individual land titles) in affected communities; moreover, by depressing some of the key drivers of deforestation, these projects are also associated with a small decrease in the annual rate of tree cover change in the medium-term.

In terms of data, in my dissertation I employ high resolution satellite imagery to measure with precision the deforestation trajectories of thousands of resource systems in Mexico, as well as other ecological variables at the community-level. In addition, I use previously untapped administrative data to explore different types of communal political behaviors. I also leverage different sources of variation in the independent variables, using staggered differences in differences and a geographic regression discontinuity.