Benavides, Jean-Paul

The conservation of tropical forests is essential for climate change mitigation and biodiversity preservation. While National Protected Areas (NPAs) are the most prominent conservation tool globally, they often struggle to align with local socioeconomic realities. In Bolivia, Municipal Protected Areas (MPAs), a subnational type of protection, offer a distinct conservation model rooted in decentralized governance. Unlike NPAs and Indigenous territories, whose establishment stalled after the 2010s despite persistent community demands, MPAs address these gaps by providing a subnational alternative. Although many indigenous territories are officially titled, significant areas remain unresolved. MPAs emerge from community-driven initiatives, with municipalities leveraging technical and financial support from NGOs and international cooperation to formalize these conservation efforts.
We employed a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach to analyze the effects of MPAs on reducing deforestation rates. Additionally, we conducted matching on baseline characteristics (e.g., slope, elevation, population density, travel time to NPAs, forest and farming area shares, etc) to ensure comparability between treated and control units. This method allows for the comparison of municipalities with MPAs established at different times, comparing municipalities that have already established MPAs (treated) with those that have not yet done so but are scheduled to in the future (not-yet-treated). By including not-yet-treated municipalities as part of the control group, the approach enables a dynamic analysis that accounts for the evolving context of conservation efforts.
The findings suggest that MPAs contribute to reducing the rate of deforestation, particularly in regions with formally recognized indigenous territories. An anticipation effect is observed, with deforestation rates starting to decline up to two years before the formal establishment of MPAs. This may reflect the lengthy process required to create these areas, during which preliminary conservation actions might begin. This effect could also be linked to the involvement of external conservation initiatives that work with communities during the preparatory phase. These results highlight the role of MPAs in supporting more sustainable land management practices by addressing local needs and aligning with decentralized governance structures.

This study examines the role of trust and reciprocity in the effectiveness of collective governance systems in hydrosocial territories, focusing on water associations managed by indigenous Aymara communities in the Bolivian Altiplano. Using path analysis and experimental economics, we measure the interaction between trust and reciprocity and cooperative behavior among 100 Aymara community members. Our results suggest that while trust is a critical factor in fostering cooperation, reciprocity is equally important in supporting the cooperation required for effective collective governance in hydrosocial territories. We find that reciprocity is particularly low in the associations studied. Our results show that the initial acts of trust were not reciprocated, making cooperation within the governance system difficult. Although communities exhibited prosocial behavior, this lack of reciprocity affected trust between members of different communities, leading to ineffective functioning of collective water resources management. More generally, our results show the vulnerability of collective governance in hydrosocial territories when collaboration is strongly based on negative reciprocal paradigms and increasingly dependent on extrinsic motivations. To address the internal causes of ineffective collective governance, a nuanced exploration of ways to foster intrinsic motivation and positive reciprocal interactions is needed and seems to require joint efforts by communities and political actors.