Paula Sarmiento (5th Year PhD)
Institutions, Incentives, and Identity in Land Use Decisions: A Micro-Level Analysis of Deforestation Drivers in the Global South
Date: 11/07/2025 (Fri)
Time: 2:00pm- 3:00pm
Location: This seminar will be held both on-site and remotely. The on-site location will be: Grainger Hall 2102. It will also be held remotely via Zoom. (Please sign in to see the link.)
Organizer: Alejandro and Xingchen
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
2:00pm - Seminar Presentation (2:00pm to 3:00pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: Tropical deforestation remains a persistent challenge across the Global South, despite decades of conservation policies and environmental regulation. While much of the existing literature emphasizes the role of economic incentives and property rights in shaping land-use decisions, fewer studies systematically examine how these mechanisms interact with institutional fragility, informal norms, and social structures. This paper investigates how smallholder farmers in a high-deforestation frontier respond to variation in land tenure, economic incentives, and state presence. Drawing on an in-person survey experiment with over 2,000 participants, we find that post-conflict stabilization efforts — particularly the replacement of non-state actors by state authorities — can unintentionally increase willingness to deforest. This effect can be mitigated by land titling, but only under specific political and social conditions: titles reduce deforestation intentions among individuals with strong conservation values or high social capital — traits that are more common among locally born individuals and active members of community organizations. In contrast, titling farmers with low perceived tenure security appears to incentivize forest clearing, likely as a strategy to reinforce land claims. Contrary to canonical land-use models, increased economic returns do not significantly affect deforestation intentions, possibly highlighting the limits of market-based tools like Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) in contexts marked by social instability. This study contributes to the literature on environmental political economy by demonstrating that the effectiveness of conservation interventions depends not only on material incentives and formal institutions, but also on informal norms, local identities, and perceptions of state legitimacy in fragile governance settings. It underscores the need for more context-sensitive and socially grounded approaches to forest conservation in the Global South. Stage: Data analysis and interpretation of results Type of feedback: We welcome all forms of feedback, but are especially interested in suggestions related to framing and empirical strategy.