Estimating the Impacts of Bolivia's Protected Areas on Poverty

By Gustavo Canavire-Bacarreza, M. Hanauer. Social Science Research Network, 2012

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Protected areas represent a powerful policy tool for the preservation of ecosystems and their services. The rapid proliferation of protected areas in Bolivia over the past several decades has prompted interest in understanding their impacts on surrounding populations. Recent studies from other developing countries show that protected areas have had positive impacts on poverty. Using rich biophysical and socioeconomic data from Bolivia we find that municipalities with at least 10% of their area occupied by a protected area established between 1992 and 2000 exhibited differentially greater levels of poverty reduction between 1992 and 2001 compared to similar municipalities unaffected by protected areas. We find that our results are robust to a number of econometric specifications, spillover analyses and a placebo study. Although our overarching results that Bolivia's protected areas were associated with poverty reduction are similar to previous studies, our underlying results differ subtly, but significantly. Previous studies found that controlling for key observable covariates led to fundamentally antithetical results compared to naive (uncontrolled) estimates. Conversely, our results indicate that naive estimates lead to an over estimation of the poverty reducing impacts of protected areas. Our results expose the heterogeneity of protected area impacts across countries and, therefore, underscore the importance of country-level impact evaluations in order to build the global knowledge base regarding the socioeconomic impacts of protected areas.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/830cc08808ac3186e7e72b0a66121c8a7489e6d3

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Citations in the corpus

Parks versus PES: Evaluating direct and incentive-based land conservation in Mexico (2017, unknown): “…improvements due to PAs found in Costa Rica, Thailand, Uganda, Bolivia, and Indonesia (Andam et al. 2010, Sims 2010, Naughton-Treves et al. 2011, Canavire-Bacarreza and Hanauer 2013, Gurney et al. 2014), no negative impacts in Cambodia (Clements et al. 2014) and mixed results in Zambia…”
Human well-being impacts of terrestrial protected areas (2012, background): “All four studies found significant beneficial impacts of protected areas on poverty alleviation in Costa Rica [67], Thailand [66,67] and Bolivia [68].”
More strictly protected areas are not necessarily more protective: evidence from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, and Thailand (2013, background): “…areas separately from confounding factors that jointly affect where protected areas are placed and the outcomes of interest (e.g., Andam et al 2008, 2010, Sims 2010, Ferraro and Hanauer 2011, Ferraro et al 2011, Joppa and Pfaff 2011, Nelson and Chomitz 2011, Canavire-Bacarreza and Hanauer 2013).”
Effects of Protected Areas on Forest Cover Change and Local Communities (2014, methodology): “Low elevation and low slope tend to be more suitable for agriculture activities, and thus protected areas tend to be located on land that is relatively steep at high elevation (Blackman et al. 2014a; Canavire and Hanauer 2013; Andam et al. 2010; Sims 2010).”