Conditional incentives are a promising complementary approach to conserve tropical forests, for example, in multiple-use protected areas. In this paper we analyze the environmental impacts of Bolsa Floresta, a forest conservation program that combines direct conditional payments with...

The transition toward a more sustainable agricultural production has become an essential step in achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs), launched by the United Nations in 2015. Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) have been proposed as a useful governance tool for guiding this...

This study investigates the impact of Indonesia’s flagship conditional cash trans- fer (CCT) program—PKH—on violent crime. Exploiting data from a randomized controlled trial and administrative data from the staggered nationwide program roll-out in combination with different causal...

Fighting corruption in one sector may improve overall governance but may also shift rent extraction activities to less scrutinized sectors. This paper highlights such unintended consequences of a federal anti-corruption strategy in Brazil by documenting the causal effects of randomized fiscal...

This paper studies the interactions between political and economic incentives to foster forest conversion in Indonesian districts. Using a district–level panel data set from 2001 to 2016, we analyze variation in remotely sensed forest losses as well as measures of land-use licensing. We link...

Pervasive tenure insecurity in developing countries is a key challenge for REDD+. Brazil, a leader in REDD+, has advanced efforts to link forest tenure reform and environmental compliance. We describe how these policies have shaped sub-national interventions with detailed data on land tenure and...

Rural specialization strategies can be examined within the forest transition framework. We compared smallholder livelihood strategies between neighboring southwestern Amazonian sites at different stages along the forest transition curve. Surveys of 243 households in Pando, Bolivia and Acre,...

In the forest–livelihoods literature, forests are widely perceived to provide both common safety nets to shocks and resources for seasonal gap-filling. We use a large global-comparative dataset to test these responses. We find households rank forest-extraction responses to shocks lower than...

This paper presents results from a comparative analysis of environmental income from approximately 8000 households in 24 developing countries collected by research partners in CIFOR’s Poverty Environment Network (PEN). Environmental income accounts for 28% of total household income, 77% of...

For applications in agricultural and environmental economics, complex ecological systems are often oversimplified to the extent that ecologists rarely consider model results valid. Recursive optimization of complex systems represents an alternative, but requires strong assumptions regarding time...