Jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use : a conceptual and computational analysis

Tropical ecosystems play a vital role in climate regulation, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services provision, and human livelihoods and culture. Yet, forest loss and degradation are ongoing in all tropical regions driven by the extraction of natural resources and the production of agricultural goods for domestic and global consumption. The agents and causes of deforestation transformed over the course of the 20th century from state-promoted settlement projects to company-led land clearing for commodity production. In response, attempts to halt deforestation have evolved since the 1950s, resulting in the patchwork of governance interventions we observe today. The most recent approach to reduce deforestation is composed of actors from multiple stakeholder groups in the form of public-private partnerships, implemented at the scale of landscapes or jurisdictions. These jurisdictional approaches have received growing attention from international forums over the past decade, and now cover over a third of the global tropical forests. Jurisdictional approaches are formalized collaborations between government entities and actors from civil society and/or the private sector. Their rules and regulations pertain to the sustainable extraction and production of natural resources and are implemented at policy-relevant boundaries where they apply to all actors within the system. While conceptually promising and increasingly implemented on the ground, jurisdictional approaches have yet to be systematically analyzed and evidence for their fitness to reduce deforestation is sparse. The goal of this dissertation is to provide a first evaluation of the effectiveness and equity of jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use and utilize software modeling as an approach for assessing multi-stakeholder governance approaches. Specifically, I aim to i) assess jurisdictional approaches conceptually and take stock of existing initiatives, ii) develop an agent-based software model to simulate governance interventions in the tropics, and iii) apply the model to analyze the effectiveness and equity of four archetypal governance interventions to reducing tropical deforestation. For the first chapter, my co-author and I analyze the emergence of jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use, conceptually evaluate their fitness to reduce deforestation in the tropics, and take stock of existing jurisdictional initiatives. Tropical forests are under increasing pressure, but conservation interventions have had only limited success in mitigating deforestation and ecosystem degradation. Over the past decade, however, jurisdictional approaches to sustainable resource use have attracted attention as an alternative to traditional conservation strategies. We compile a global database of conservation initiatives and develop a definition and typology for jurisdictional approaches; of the eighty initiatives included in our database, twenty-five meet this definition. These jurisdictions encompassed approximately forty percent of global tropical forests, with most experiencing higher-than-average deforestation rates. Although jurisdictional approaches harbor the potential to overcome the limitations of previous approaches, numerous challenges for implementation and operation remain. For the second chapter, my co-author and I develop an agent-based model to simulate governance interventions in tropical frontier systems to overcome the methodological shortcomings of traditional approaches to policy evaluation. Here, we introduce the Agent-based simulation of land use governance (ABSOLUG) designed to examine the interactions among governments, commodity producers, and civil society, and assess the impacts of different land use governance approaches on deforestation. The model represents a generic commodity producing landscape in the tropics with a central marketplace and features four categories of agents: largeholders, smallholders, NGOs, and a government. Statistical evaluation through local and global sensitivity analyses shows that the model is robust, and few parameters show threshold behaviors. We used three governance scenarios to evaluate the model operationally. The hands-off scenario was inspired by high rates of tropical deforestation in the second half of the 20th century, the middle-ground scenario by compliance with international conservation treaties, and the proactive government scenario by a few recent cases of forest transition countries. The hands-off scenario led to quasi-complete deforestation of the landscape at the end of the simulation period, while deforestation in the middle-ground scenario leveled off and then stagnated. In the proactive government scenario, deforestation decreased and eventually stopped in the second half of the simulation period, followed by reforestation. We demonstrate that the ABSOLUG model can simulate key policy interventions and land use trajectories in tropical systems, and as such can be a valuable contribution to the growing literature on environmental policy and governance evaluation. Building on the second chapter, my co-author and I apply the Agent-based simulation of land use governance (ABSOLUG) in chapter three to evaluate the effectiveness and equity of four governance archetypes: weak regulation of natural resource access, command-and-control, supply chain sustainability, and multi-stakeholder coalitions. We simulate each intervention under varying conditions of the underlying socio-ecological system pertaining to the capacity of civic and public institutions, stakeholder compositions of producer agents, and the remaining forest cover of the system. We further test the interventions in two scenarios resembling major commodity production system, namely soy in the Brazilian Amazon and palm oil in Indonesia. Our results show that all interventions are effective in reducing deforestation, but not all are equitable. Outcomes vary significantly depending on the conditions of the system: we find that interventions perform best when they match the underlying systemic conditions and that, on average, the multi-stakeholder coalition provides the best effectiveness-equity trade-off across conditions. Our study further demonstrates that agent-based modeling is a valuable addition to the methodological toolkit for evaluating land use governance interventions in the tropics and can provide complementary perspectives to traditional approaches

Keywords: Earth System Science.
Advisor: Lambin Eric F.
Daily Gretchen C.
Dirzo Rodolfo
Naylor Rosamond