UCLA

Remote sensing technologies are central to tropical forest monitoring, yet the institutional mechanisms constraining their adoption and operationalization within responsible organizations remain poorly understood. Drawing on thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with actors across the remote sensing value chain in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, we examine how institutional arrangements shape remote sensing capacity within organizations directly engaged in tropical forest monitoring and management. We distinguish between operational frictions, the practical obstacles practitioners encounter in day-to-day remote sensing work, and the institutional conditions that generate and sustain them, organized across four capacity dimensions: dependable data access, technical expertise, organizational support and mandate clarity, and equitable user-provider relations. Our findings show that capacity constraints are not primarily technical but institutional: external data ownership and governance structures, organizational instability, weak mandates, and asymmetric power within the remote sensing value chain interact and compound to undermine capacity even where technical resources are nominally available. These dynamics are especially pronounced for subnational governments, Indigenous organizations, and civil society actors at the periphery of the value chain, who face severe barriers and are frequently on the frontlines of deforestation. Our results suggest that capacity building efforts are more likely to yield durable results when they engage directly with the institutional contexts in which remote sensing is embedded, rather than focusing primarily on individual frictions, such as data access or technical skill development.