Oaxaca and global forest governance: Indigenous autonomy, local institutions, and forest outcomes in Southern Mexico

Kyle Haines

doi:10.2458/jpe.2296

Abstract

Oaxaca is the most biologically-and culturally-diverse state of Mexico, and considered by many to be a source of best practices for the role of Indigenous peoples in forest governance. Utilizing an original data set containing census and remote sensing information, I construct a set of empirical tests to assess the impact of indigenous peoples and decentralized local institutions on forest loss in Mexico. Recognizing the great biological and cultural diversity of Mexico, I employ an ecoregion sampling technique to understand trends in different vegetation regimes and to understand better how local institutions influenced forest loss between 2000-2015 by looking within shared watersheds crossing the Oaxacan border. The results indicate that, contrary to strategies based on targeting simply the presence of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous households weakly correlate with forest loss, while Oaxacan autonomous Indigenous municipalities, which retain meaningful influence on local institutions, consistently have lower forest loss across national, regional, and ecoregional samples.

Highlights

Political efforts to address it, are reconfiguring relationships between people and forests, and between levels of government charged with forest stewardship (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2006; Moser and Boykoff 2013)
The diversity of the Oaxacan institutional experiment and the biological richness of Mexico, give researchers tools for gaining more interesting insights into the conditions for success of REDD+ and better empirical tools for comparing similar groups by the kinds of resources and ecological services their particular forest biomes provide. To understand what such a more detailed subnational and ecosystem-based sampling can yield, I am asking two fairly straightforward empirical questions—1) do municipalities in Mexico with more Indigenous households or speakers of Indigenous languages have less forest loss? and 2) do municipalities of Mexico with recognized local government have less forest loss?. These results show that, in a national survey of municipalities, Indigenous households are weakly correlated with more forest loss, a contradictory finding and a puzzle for narratives relying on the presence of Indigenous peoples as necessary and sufficient conditions for successful forest management, rather than focusing on their influence over politics and management of resources
Oaxaca contains some of the tropical forests most impacted by each of these trends but shows different trends from the rest of Southern Mexico

Summary

Introduction

Political efforts to address it, are reconfiguring relationships between people and forests, and between levels of government charged with forest stewardship (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2006; Moser and Boykoff 2013) This is especially true in 'developing' countries, which contain the majority of the world's remaining intact forest ecosystems. With mounting evidence of social and ecological challenges brought about by climate change and the advancing efforts to assess and measure carbon emissions and sinks, forests have been recognized as globally important parts of any effort to remove and sequester CO2 in the atmosphere (Busch et al 2019; de Jong et al 2000) This has led to an expanding interest in tropical forests in particular and the kinds of institutional, cultural, and economic prerequisites for successful and equitable management of the resources, environmental services, and conservation goals to which they contribute (Dauvergne and Neville 2010)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion