Publications

Effects of Forestry Decentralization on Rural Inequality in Nepal

Cook, N. J., Andersson, K. P., Benedum, M. E., Grillos, T., Karna, B. K., Khatri, D. B., & Poudel, D. P. 2025. Accepted and forthcoming at Nature Sustainability.

Abstract: Decentralized, community-based approaches to natural resource governance are believed to promote conservation while reducing poverty in the Global South. However, the local distribution of benefits under decentralized natural resource governance is often highly unequal, and also inequitable because it reflects pre-existing social inequalities. There is a lack of rigorous evidence from large-scale population studies showing how decentralization programs affect inequality compared to what is observed in the absence of decentralization, and extant theory leads to competing hypotheses about positive or negative effects of decentralization on inequality. Analysing data on forest governance committees across Nepal and household-level data from two nationwide censuses, we find evidence suggesting that Nepal’s forestry decentralization program delivers significant poverty-alleviating benefits to the dominant ethnic and caste groups and comparatively smaller benefits to members of marginalized minority groups, apparently resulting in local increases in rural inequality associated with the program.

Dropping Out of Environmental Governance: Why Nepal’s Community-based Forestry Program is Losing Participants

Cook, N. J., Acharya, S., Khatri, D. B., & Poudel, D. P. 2025. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 13(1): 00059.

Abstract: Nepal’s community forestry program is widely regarded as successful. At its peak, the program enlisted a large share of the rural population as managers of the country’s communal forests. However, recent empirical evidence suggests that voluntary participation in the program is in decline. Analyzing the empirical literature, we describe this surprising pattern of decline and discuss potential negative impacts. We also use political-economic reasoning and extant evidence to theorize about the drivers of this decline, arguing that livelihood diversification and profitable out-migration have altered the forest-people relationship in many villages, weakening incentives for participation in community forestry. Finally, we assess the viability of several institutional options for either replacing the program with other management approaches or reforming it to boost incentives for participation in light of the noted socioeconomic changes in rural Nepal. We argue that well-designed payment schemes or reforms that enable local people to commercialize community forests could both support participation by enhancing the associated benefits, and institutional changes related to local meetings and labor requirements could do so by reducing the associated costs. The replacement of community-based approaches with top-down management or privatization, however, appears risky due to a potential lack of government capacity and the possibility that such institutional changes could damage livelihoods or create negative externalities for some households. The consolidation of community forests also presents governance and management challenges. Our analysis suggests the need for greater scholarly attention to how environmental policy tools withstand social and economic change, and to environmental policy succession—or how environmental policies are reimagined when they are no longer an appropriate fit for the local context.

Remittance Income Weakens Participation in Community-based Natural Resource Management

Benedum, M. E., Cook, N. J., & Vallury, S. 2025. Ecology & Society, 30(3)

Abstract: While many Global South contexts rely on community-based natural resource management, out-migration has the potential to change rural peoples’ incentives to participate in such management. We argue that remittance income from out-migration reduces dependence on natural resource commons, which may in turn weaken the voluntary participation upon which community-based natural resource management initiatives depend. We studied this relationship empirically in Nepal, a country with a largely community-based model for the governance of its forests. In analyzing nationwide survey data that spanned nearly one decade, we fit a household-level fixed-effects regression model, which showed that households that received more remittance income were less likely to rely on commonly held forests compared to households in the same village that received less remittance income. Using a similar estimation approach and more detailed survey data from the districts of Mustang and Gorkha, we also showed that larger remittance incomes predicted less participation in forest governance and management activities. These results suggest that the remittances associated with out-migration from rural areas can weaken incentives for local participation in natural resource management among the people left behind. If remittance income has these effects, policymakers may need to reconsider how to sustain community-based resource management in countries or regions that are experiencing widespread rural out-migration. Future research is needed to establish causality, validate the results cross-nationally, and explore new policy innovations that could support resource governance in contexts where many resource users receive remittances.

Collective PES Contracts Can Motivate Institutional Creation to Conserve Forests: Experimental Evidence

Grillos, T., N. J. Cook, & Andersson, K. P. 2024. Conservation Letters e13066.

Abstract: Incentives are a widely used tool for addressing deforestation and are often implemented as collective contracts. Local institutions are crucial to the solution of collective action problems associated with forest conservation, but we still have little knowledge of how to encourage institutional creation through policy. Since collective contracts do not eliminate freeriding incentives, we argue that their success hinges on their ability to stimulate the creation of institutions for collective action. To test these ideas, we analyze data from an incentivized lab-in-the-field experimental collective action game played with natural resource users in four developing countries. The experiment simulates management of a common forest, and groups were randomly assigned to a conservation incentive payment condition. We observe how much group members attempt to coordinate on the creation of institutional rules and find experimental evidence that an external incentive program can stimulate the endogenous creation of informal institutions.

Experimental Evidence on Minority Participation and the Design of Community-Based Natural Resource Management Programs

Cook, N. J. 2024. Ecological Economics, 218: 108114.

Abstract: In many Global South countries, experiences with CBNRM to date suggest that members of marginalized groups are often less likely to participate in CBNRM compared to members of the dominant groups. This study provides evidence on two institutional features of CBNRM that may help to narrow this gap: (1) targeted benefits that are funded from the proceeds from CBNRM and earmarked for participants belonging to marginalized groups, and (2) mandated representation of marginalized groups on the local decision-making bodies that govern CBNRM. Evidence from a framed vignette experiment with respondents in rural Nepal suggests that these two institutional features have positive effects on intentions to join CBNRM-related groups, attend meetings, and speak up at meetings among members of marginalized ethnic and caste groups, ultimately narrowing gaps in intentions to participate.

Conservation Payments and Perceptions of Equity: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia, Peru, and Tanzania

Cook, N. J., T. Grillos, & Andersson, K. P. 2023. Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, 5: 100212.

Abstract: While monetary incentives may be a promising tool for encouraging tropical forest conservation in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the equity implications of such incentives are drawing scrutiny. Furthermore, little is known about how program design shapes perceptions of fairness and equity among program participants, and it remains unclear whether devolving the decision power over the distribution of payments to local leaders helps or harms local perceptions of equity. We implemented a ‘lab-in-the-field’ experiment with 448 participants in rural villages in Indonesia, Peru, and Tanzania, framed around two versions of a collective payments for ecosystem services (PES) program. Participants perceived the program as less equitable when the collective payment was distributed according to the discretion of a locally chosen leader, compared to when the payment was distributed perfectly equally by design. The negative effect is only seen among participants who were given a low share of the payment, which suggests that it is not the involvement of a leader per se that leads to lower perceptions of equity, but the inegalitarian distribution of the payment that sometimes occurs when a leader has the discretion to choose how the payment is distributed. The results highlight the importance of designing conservation incentive programs that give opportunities for local involvement while still encouraging equitable local decisions.

Promoting Women’s Leadership Under Environmental Decentralization: The Roles of Domestic Policy, Foreign Aid, and Population Change

Cook, N. J., M. E. Benedum, G. Gorti, & Thapa, S. 2023. Environmental Science & Policy, 139: 240-249.

Abstract: In recent decades, countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa have adopted environmental decentralization reforms to encourage the community-based management of water, forests, fisheries, and other natural resources. While such reforms are meant to empower rural people to participate in environmental governance, experiences from recent decades suggest that these reforms often suffer from gendered inequalities in participation and leadership. We use the case of a forestry-sector decentralization reform in Nepal to test the importance of domestic policy, foreign aid, and population change for promoting women’s leadership under environmental decentralization. Using data on local natural resource governance committees formed in villages across the country under the reform, we find that a non-binding government guideline encouraging committees to prioritize women’s leadership resulted in an estimated increase of 7.5 percentage points in the number of leadership seats held by women on these committees. We also show that locally-targeted, sector-specific foreign aid projects appear to have a strong impact, with rates of women’s leadership that are estimated to be 24 percentage points higher in committees formed in areas with projects, compared to rates in comparable committees formed in areas without such projects at the time of formation. Finally, we instrument for international male out-migration in rural Nepal, and find no apparent effect of international male out-migration on rates of women’s leadership in local natural resource governance committees. The results highlight the importance of domestic policy, even without stringent enforcement, and targeted foreign aid projects for promoting women’s leadership under environmental decentralization.

Can Restoration of the Commons Reduce Rural Vulnerability? A Quasi-Experimental Comparison of COVID-19 Livelihood-based Coping Strategies among Rural Households in Three Indian States

Hughes, K. A., P. Priyadarshini, H. Sharma, S. Lissah, T. Chorran, R. Meinzen-Dick, A. Dogra, N. J. Cook, & Andersson, K. P. 2022. International Journal of the Commons, 16(1): 189-208.

Abstract: India has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of a larger quasi-experimental impact assessment, we assess the pandemic’s effects on household coping behavior in 80 villages spread across four districts and three states (n = 772). Half of these villages were targeted by a largescale common land restoration program spearheaded by an NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). The other half are yet to be targeted but are statistically similar vis-à-vis FES’s village targeting criteria. Analyzing the results of a phone survey administered eight to ten months into the pandemic and its associated lockdowns, we find that the livelihood activities of households in both sets of villages were adversely impacted by COVID-19. Consequently, most households had to resort to various negative coping behaviors, e.g., distressed asset sales and reduced farm input expenditure. From the same mobile survey data, we construct a Livelihoods Coping Strategies Index (LCSI) and find that households in villages targeted by FES’s common land restoration initiative score 11.3% lower on this index on average, equating to a 4.5 percentage point difference. While modest, this statistically significant effect estimate (p < 0.05) is consistent across the four districts and robust to alterative model and outcome specifications. We find no empirical support that our observed effect was due to improved access to common pool resources or government social programs. Instead, we speculate that this effect may be driven by institutional factors, rather than economic, a proposition we will test in future work.

Gender Quotas Increase the Equality and Effectiveness of Climate Interventions

Cook, N. J., T. Grillos, & Andersson, K. P. 2019. Nature Climate Change, 9(4): 330-334.

Abstract: Interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions strive to promote gender balance so that men and women have equal rights to participate in, and benefit from, decision making associated with such interventions. The conventional way to achieve gender balance in interventions is to introduce gender quotas. While such quotas are often justified on the grounds of fairness and equal rights, we propose that gender quotas can also help climate policy interventions become more effective. To test this idea, we use a randomized lab-in-the-field experiment in which local forest users in 28 villages in Indonesia, Peru, and Tanzania made decisions about extraction and conservation in a commonly held forest. We randomly assigned a gender quota to half of the participating groups, requiring that at least 50% of group members were women. Groups with the gender quota conserved more forest resources as a response to a Payments for Ecosystem Services intervention and shared this payment more equally. Our analysis further shows that the inequality-reducing effect of the quota was due to the overall gender composition of the group, not the promotion of women to leadership positions. One of the policy implications of this result is that interventions would benefit from introducing gender quotas that go beyond a minimalist approach – which merely seeks to improve gender balance – to ensure that at least half of the members of decision-making groups are women. 

Experimental Evidence on Payments for Forest Commons Conservation

Andersson, K. P., N. J. Cook, T. Grillos … & Mwangi, E. 2018.  Nature Sustainability, 1(3): 128-135.  

Abstract: Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) represent a popular strategy for environmental protection, and tropical forest conservation in particular. Little is known, however, about how tropical forest users respond to PES interventions, or how the characteristics of local users might influence the effectiveness of PES incentives. Many argue that even if PES increases conservation in the short-run, it may adversely affect other motivations for environmental behavior, potential damaging conservation efforts in the longer-run, once payments are removed. We propose that conditional payments can help forest users to conserve their shared forest resources, even after payments end, especially when users trust each other. Using a framed field experiment with 1,200 tropical forest users in five countries, we test these ideas and show that (1) during the PES intervention, conditional payments increased conservation behavior; (2) even after payments stopped, users continued to conserve more than they did before the PES intervention, and (3) trust amplified the lasting conservation effects of the PES interventions. Our findings suggest that policy actors can increase PES program effectiveness by designing interventions that facilitate and promote interpersonal communication, and by prioritizing implementation in contexts where forest users enjoy high levels of trust.

Selected working papers

Which Individual-Level Factors Explain Women’s Non-Participation in Local Water Governance? Evidence from Bangladesh

Cook, N. J., Nair, K. S., & Nath, S. Revise and resubmit to Ecology and Society.

Abstract: Whereas the institutional rules and social dynamics of organizations and communities have received considerable attention as explanations for gender disparities in participation in community-based water management, we examine the individual- and household-level mediators of women’s non-participation. We advance theories about several such factors that may partially explain gender disparities in participation in water management organizations (WMOs). Using individual-level data from a nationally representative survey of WMO participants and non-participants in rural Bangladesh, we find preliminary evidence consistent with the theory that women’s lack of decision-making autonomy in the household and lack of access to agricultural information explain a sizable share of women’s non-participation in WMOs. We fail to find evidence in support of hypotheses that time poverty or perceptions of efficacy have such effects. These findings advance understandings of gender inequalities in participation, and also suggest that policy reforms and interventions outside the area of water governance may help to narrow gender disparities in participation if they address certain disadvantages that women face outside the context of the WMO.

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