Adriana Molina Garzón

Publications

Place-based solutions for global social-ecological dilemmas: An analysis of locally grounded, diversified, and cross-scalar initiatives in the Amazon (2023). Londres, M., Salk, C., Andersson, K. P., Tengö, M., Brondizio, E. S., Lopes, G. R., Sacha MO S.; Molina-Garzon, A.; Sonetti-González T.; Rázuri Montoya, D.; Futemma, C.; de Castro, F.; Tourne D. C.M. Global Environmental Change, 82, 102718. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102718

Enforcement and inequality in collective PES to reduce tropical deforestation: effectiveness, efficiency and equity implications (2022). Naime Sanchez-Henkel J., Angelsen A., Molina-Garzón A., Carillho C., Selviana V., Demarchi G., Duchelle A., Martius C. Global Environmental Change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102520

Collective Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), where forest users receive compensation conditional on group rather than individual performance, are an increasingly used policy instrument to reduce tropical deforestation. However, implementing effective, (cost) efficient and equitable (3E) collective PES is challenging because individuals have an incentive to free-ride on others’ conservation actions. We find that introducing individual level sanctions can improve the effectiveness, efficiency and equity of collective PES, but there is no silver bullet that consistently improves all 3Es across country sites. Public monitoring reduced deforestation and improved the equity of the program in sites with stronger history of collective action. External sanctions provided the strongest and most robust improvement in the 3Es. While internal, peer enforcement can significantly reduce free riding, it does not improve the program’s efficiency, and thus participants’ earnings. The sanctioning mechanisms failed to systematically improve the equitable distribution of benefits due to the ineffectiveness of punishments to target the largest free-riders

Can decentralization Increase Social Capital Among Bureaucrats? (2021). Adriana Molina-Garzón, Tara Grillos, Alan Zarychta and Krister P. Andersson. American Journal of Political Science AJPS. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12606

Collective action among public officials is necessary for the effective delivery of many social services, but relatively little is known about how it can be fostered through policy reforms. In this paper, we compare cooperation among public officials within decentralized versus centrally-administered municipalities in Honduras. Leveraging a quasi-experiment in health-sector reform, coupled with behavioral games and social network surveys, we find that decentralization is associated with greater cooperation. When they are able to communicate, health-sector workers in decentralized municipalities contribute more to a public good than their centrally-administered counterparts. This increase in cooperative behavior results in part from the decentralization reform engendering greater numbers of interactions and stronger ties across different levels of government. These findings indicate that institutional reforms like decentralization can favorably reconfigure patterns of social interactions across public organizations, which is an important component of administrative capacity in developing countries.

Making place-based sustainability initiatives visible in the Brazilian Amazon (2021). Brondizio E., Andersson K., de Castro F., Futemma C., Salk C., Tengo M., Londres M., C.M. Tourne D., González T., Molina-Garzón A., Russo G., and Siani S. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2021.03.007

From state-based developmentalism to community-based initiatives to market-based conservation, the Brazilian Amazon has been a laboratory of development interventions for over 50 years. The region is now confronting a devastating COVID-19 pandemic amid renewed environmental pressures and increasing social inequities. While these forces are shaping the present and future of the region, the Amazon has also become an incubator of local innovations and efforts confronting these pressures. Often overlooked, place-based initiatives involving individual and collective-action have growing roles in promoting regional sustainability. We review the history of development interventions influencing the emergence of place-based initiatives and their potential to promoting changes in productive systems, value-aggregation and market-access, and governance arrangements improving living-standards and environmental sustainability. We provide examples of initiatives documented by the AGENTS project, contextualizing them within the literature.

Voluntary Leadership and the Emergence of Institutions for self-governance (2020). Krister Andersson, Kimberlee Change and Adriana Molina-Garzón. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(44), 27292-27299. https://doiorgcolorado.idm.oclc.org/10.1073/pnas.2007230117

Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse

Framed Field Experiment on Resource Scarcity & Extraction: Path-dependent generosity within sequential water appropriation (2015). Alexander Pfaff, Maria Alejandra Velez, Pablo Ramos and Adriana Molina. Ecological Economics, 120 (2015) 416-429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.06.002

How one treats others is important within collective action. We ask if resource scarcity in the past, due to its effects upon past behaviors, influences current other-regarding behaviors. Contrasting theories and empirical findings on scarcity motivate our framed field experiment. Our results suggest that facing higher scarcity can erode the bases for collective actions. For establishing new institutions, timing relative to scarcity could affect the probability of success.

Working Papers

NGOs Incentive-Based Forest Program Effects on Perceived Regulatory Fairness. Adriana Molina-Garzon, Julia Naime and Arild Angelsen

The role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as collaborators in the delivery of public services has been perceived as a mechanism to promote larger and more impactful public programs. This dynamic may also favor improvements in citizens’ sentiments toward governments because it could improve the flow of information between citizens and governments or because NGOs may reduce the risk of unfairly targeted regulation. How does the role of NGOs working directly with communities in the implementation of programs to reduce deforestation and forest degradation influence citizens view of governments’ regulatory role? This study focuses on the tension between the provision of incentives to avoid deforestation by program implementing NGOs, vis-à-vis government’s regulatory efforts to reduce deforestation. We combine data from a household-level survey and a framed field experiment (FFE) collected in Peru and Brazil. At each country, the same survey and FFE were implemented in a set of control and intervention communities where non-governmental actors implemented a REDD+ program. We found that the NGOs presence reduced perceived fairness of government’s regulations and increased the perceived frequency of monitoring by the NGOs. In consequence, during the FFE individuals in REDD+ communities behaved less cooperatively in the FFE when the government was introduced as an external enforcement agent implementing sanctions to violators, compared to individuals from control communities.

REDD+ impacts on forest conservation and local livelihoods: a longitudinal assessment in the Brazilian Amazon. Cauê D. Carrilho, Julia Naime Naime; Adriana Molina-Garzón; Carla Morsello; Chervier Colas

REDD+ is supposed to advance forest conservation and climate change mitigation while improving rural livelihoods or, at least, doing no harm to local people. Many REDD+ initiatives thus provide incentives to support farmers’ livelihoods and reduce their deforestation practices. Using counterfactual impact evaluation methods, we investigated the impacts of an incentive-based REDD+ program in the state of Acre (western Brazilian Amazon) on a series of land use and livelihood outcomes. Impacts were evaluated both during and after the program, contributing to the knowledge of REDD+ effectiveness and permanence of outcomes. We used panel survey data from 262 households (treatment: 150; comparison: 112) collected in three data points (2010, 2013, 2019). We found the program saved an average of 6.23% to 7.33% of forest cover per participant household in the first years of implementation, and forest conservation came at the expense of pasture reduction. Forest loss has resumed for the second period, but not at a rate that eliminated previous forest conservation gains from REDD+ saving years. Moreover, long-lasting increases in farm income were detected. In aggregate, our findings suggest that incentive-based programs can achieve the hoped-for win-win outcomes for REDD+.

Work in Progress