► Most user groups in Bolivia have created their own forest governance arrangements. ► Support from external organizations can increase the likelihood of local governance. ► Bolivian forest users ...report a wide variety of relationships with external actors. ► Users facing high uncertainty prefer working with municipalities over other actors. ► Municipal support improves the prospects for self-governance by Bolivian forest users.
Local efforts to govern forests can benefit from support from organizations operating at broader governance scales. This paper investigates why local users value the support from some organizations more than others, and the extent to which these preferences matter for governance choices. Analyzing data from 200 forest user groups in Bolivia, I find that users rate their relationships with nongovernmental organizations and municipal governments equally high, but only relationships with municipalities affect the probability of establishing local governance institutions. I attribute these results to differences in the external actors’ motivation and ability to respond to local governance needs.
Physical exercise can improve brain function and delay neurodegeneration; however, the initial signal from muscle to brain is unknown. Here we show that the lactate receptor (HCAR1) is highly ...enriched in pial fibroblast-like cells that line the vessels supplying blood to the brain, and in pericyte-like cells along intracerebral microvessels. Activation of HCAR1 enhances cerebral vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGFA) and cerebral angiogenesis. High-intensity interval exercise (5 days weekly for 7 weeks), as well as L-lactate subcutaneous injection that leads to an increase in blood lactate levels similar to exercise, increases brain VEGFA protein and capillary density in wild-type mice, but not in knockout mice lacking HCAR1. In contrast, skeletal muscle shows no vascular HCAR1 expression and no HCAR1-dependent change in vascularization induced by exercise or lactate. Thus, we demonstrate that a substance released by exercising skeletal muscle induces supportive effects in brain through an identified receptor.
This article draws on health sector reform in Honduras to examine the mechanisms through which governance reforms shape the behavior of street‐level bureaucrats. It combines insights from behavioral ...public administration with original data from lab‐in‐the‐field workshops conducted with more than 200 bureaucrats to assess the relationship between decentralization and motivation. Findings show strong evidence that motivation, measured as self‐sacrifice, is higher among bureaucrats in decentralized municipalities compared with bureaucrats in comparable centrally administered municipalities. Increased motivation is most pronounced in decentralized systems led by nongovernmental organizations compared with those led by municipal governments or associations. Additionally, the evidence suggests that higher motivation is related to changes in the composition of staff rather than socialization or changes among existing staff. Overall, this research helps move beyond indiscriminate calls for decentralization by highlighting the interplay between reform design and bureaucratic behavior, as well as the limitations of governance reforms in motivating more experienced bureaucrats.
•We assess the responsiveness of local government to citizen needs in forestry.•Survey data from 200 rural municipalities in Bolivia and Guatemala are used.•Municipalities receiving NGO donations are ...rated as less responsive.•Citizen pressure on local governments counteracts this apparent negative effect.•NGO donations can “crowd out” the influence of citizens in local public affairs.
Concerned with the challenges of sustainable development, policy makers and scholars often urge nongovernmental organizations to increase their efforts to support governance of natural resources in developing countries. How does funding from external NGOs influence the responsiveness of local government policy to the sector-specific needs and policy preferences of local citizens? Using a unique longitudinal dataset from surveys of local governance actors in 200 municipalities in Bolivia and Guatemala, we explore these questions in the context of local natural resource policy. We find preliminary support for the hypothesis that external NGOs gain disproportionate influence over local policy processes in forestry by donating to local governments, and that this influence “crowds out” the influence of local grassroots actors, leading to less responsive local governance as rated by councils of local citizens. However, political pressure on local government officials from organized local groups in the forestry sector counteracts this negative relationship. Although NGOs can contribute to technical capacity for local governments and are generally seen as supportive of decentralized and participatory governance, our findings suggest that NGOs exert political pressure on local governments in pursuit of their own policy goals, and that NGO support may sometimes steer local governments away from responding to the specific livelihood needs of local resource users. More generally, our findings underscore the importance of local political contexts in moderating the effects of NGO interventions.
•Social, biophysical, and institutional contexts affect forest users’ incentives to restore forests.•We analyzed observations from 184 different groups in 133 forests across eight developing ...countries.•Social contexts condition the effect of institutional and biophysical factors.
Social, biophysical, and institutional contexts affect forest users’ incentives to work together to restore forests. With renewed government commitments to support such activities, we argue that effective interventions need to consider several context-specific factors – such as the user groups’ future discount rates, opportunity costs, and collective-action capabilities – because these factors will help determine the effectiveness of such interventions. To test the effects of a suite of contextual factors, we analyzed observations from 184 different groups in 133 forests across eight developing countries. We find that the combination of certain enabling factors increases the probability of users undertaking forest improvement activities, and that social contexts can condition the effect of institutional and biophysical contexts. Our findings carry implications for the design and implementation of future interventions to restore forests in developing countries.
The introduction of formal collective property rights to forest lands appears to have improved both environmental and economic outcomes, but there is limited evidence on how these reforms affect ...cooperative behavior among local resource users. We propose that when national governments issue collective land rights, they strengthen the collective psychological ownership among coowners and produce increased levels of cooperative behavior. Analyzing data from 213 forest user groups in 10 countries, and a framed field experiment in a subset of sites, we find that collective land titling is associated with significantly higher levels of cooperative behavior including increased levels of trust, more frequent interpersonal interactions related to both forestry and nonforestry activities, more self‐governing institutions, and greater equality in resource extraction patterns.
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. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. 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.
Governance reforms like decentralization and performance-based management aim to improve public services by increasing accountability among street-level bureaucrats: bureaucrats may be held to ...account by communities, supervisors, intermediary organizations, or all of these. To assess the relationship between accountability and bureaucratic effort, we utilize data from a lab-in-the-field behavioral experiment conducted with Honduran health workers across decentralized and centrally administered municipalities. We presented health workers with an incentivized effort task that included instructions that were neutral, had a bottom-up political accountability prompt, or a top-down bureaucratic accountability prompt. Our results show that administrative context moderates the accountability-to-effort relationship. With neutral instructions, civil servants in decentralized systems exert greater quality effort than their counterparts under centralized administration. Importantly, both accountability prompts increase quality effort in centrally administered settings to levels comparable with those in decentralized settings. These findings support multiple accountability as a potentially important mechanism linking decentralization reform to improved service delivery.
Policy makers around the world tout decentralization as an effective tool in the governance of natural resources. Despite the popularity of these reforms, there is limited scientific evidence on the ...environmental effects of decentralization, especially in tropical biomes. This study presents evidence on the institutional conditions under which decentralization is likely to be successful in sustaining forests. We draw on common-pool resource theory to argue that the environmental impact of decentralization hinges on the ability of reforms to engage local forest users in the governance of forests. Using matching techniques, we analyze longitudinal field observations on both social and biophysical characteristics in a large number of local government territories in Bolivia (a country with a decentralized forestry policy) and Peru (a country with a much more centralized forestry policy). We find that territories with a decentralized forest governance structure have more stable forest cover, but only when local forest user groups actively engage with the local government officials. We provide evidence in support of a possible causal process behind these results: When user groups engage with the decentralized units, it creates a more enabling environment for effective local governance of forests, including more local government-led forest governance activities, fora for the resolution of forest-related conflicts, intermunicipal cooperation in the forestry sector, and stronger technical capabilities of the local government staff.
Abstract
Decentralization reform has both advantages and risks. Bringing service delivery “closer to the people” can improve information flows and strengthen accountability, but it may also leave ...systems vulnerable to elite capture and corruption by municipal government officials. While past research has acknowledged the possibility of corruption under decentralization, relatively little work has connected those risks to features of these reforms or specific local institutional arrangements. To explore the conditions that can help mitigate the risks of corruption under decentralization, we study the case of health sector reform in Honduras where municipal governments, associations, and NGOs each serve as intermediary-managing organizations under a common decentralized health service delivery model. We argue that three types of institutional arrangements reflecting local accountability practices serve as checks on the authority granted through decentralization and can help guard against corruption: external supervision, civil society engagement, and public participation. Empirically, we draw on data from more than 600 street-level bureaucrats, valuable but under-utilized informants about municipal corruption, across a matched sample of 65 municipalities with contrasting forms of administration. We find that reported corruption is highest under decentralization led by municipal governments, as compared to association- or NGO-led varieties. Both external supervision and civil society engagement help attenuate the positive association between decentralization and corruption, but public participation does not. Overall, this research highlights the importance of considering reform features and local conditions when designing policies to help manage risks and support effective social sector decentralization.
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