Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

One of the enduring challenges of participatory, decentralized approaches to managing natural resources is that such approaches may enable exclusion and inequality that mirror longstanding social inequalities by ethnicity, class, and gender. Despite this problem, the decentralization of natural governance is an increasingly popular conservation tool across the developing world, as evidenced by the fact that rural communities now collectively manage a substantial and growing share of the world's forests. Understanding the conditions that either exacerbate or mitigate inequality in the context of participatory and decentralized natural resource governance is therefore critical to ensuring the sustainability of the commons in the 21^stcentury. I shed light on this question by highlighting the conditions under which participatory, decentralized natural resource governance reforms may achieve a “pro-minority bias,” allowing members of historically disadvantaged ethnic groups to take advantage of the reforms more actively than members of elite ethnic groups. I use three approaches to show that the conditions placed on local communities by governments and other external organizations explain why the pro-minority bias arises in some cases and not others. First, I use quasi-experimental methods and a nationally-representative household survey across two decades in Nepal to examine household participation in the country’s community forestry program, under which millions of households participate in more than 20,000 user groups for the governance of more than one third of the forested land in the country. Comparing households in villages that received a forest user group to households in a counterfactual group of similar villages that had not yet received a group, I find that households from disadvantaged ethnic groups were substantially more likely to start participating in the program after local implementation compared to households from elite ethnic groups. I argue that the design of the reform explains why the Nepalese case is so exceptional; By mandating that local user groups implement redistributive and pro-poor policies, the central government and external NGOs created a set of incentives that offset the opportunity costs of participation for disadvantaged households, boosting the participation of ethnic minority groups that are disproportionately poor. Second, I use machine learning methods and data from a more detailed household survey in two districts in Nepal to expand upon these results by considering multiple dimensions of participation on the part of disadvantaged ethnic groups. Third, I use a sample of households in a broader set of Global South countries to leverage variation in the degree of external involvement in local forest user groups and generalize results across country contexts. The results suggest two important implications for commons research and practice: First, participation in decentralized natural resource governance is difficult to explain if resource users are treated as homogenous, or if interactions between local social structure and national or international-level project design are ignored. Second, relationships between local institutions and external governance actors partially explain why some communities exhibit higher levels of ethnic inequality in local governance participation.