Vietnam's successful forest conservation efforts rely on local coordination of mixes of conservation policy instruments

Keywords: land-use and land-cover change, deforestation, forest governance
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

Vietnam’s government has deployed diverse forest conservation policy instruments, including protected areas, Payments for Forest Environmental Services (PFES), Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), and a national logging ban. While economic headwinds may have helped drive Vietnam’s forest transition, local pockets of deforestation remain, and the country has instituted a significant national forest conservation policy mix. Using Cox proportional hazards models estimated with a national sample of thirty-meter-by-thirty-meter patches forested as of 2000, we evaluate the effects of Vietnam’s landscape-scale forest conservation policy instruments on forest protection, individually and through interaction with organizational network quality. We find that, despite its haphazard implementation, Vietnam’s PFES program appears to have had a substantial impact on forest protection, with long-run potential to slow deforestation to rates comparable to those in protected areas. Using data from three rounds of REDD+ policy network surveys in the country, combined with secondary data on the geography of organizational activities, we present evidence that more densely connected forest governance networks are associated with reduced deforestation and a boost in the effectiveness of the PFES program. However, we find no evidence that local network quality reduces forest loss in protected areas. We conclude that efforts to develop effective landscape-scale forest protection will require explicit consideration of the interactions among multiple forest conservation policy instruments as well as between these policy instruments and the networks of organizations implementing them.