What’s governance got to do with it? Examining the role of institutional quality in forest conservation
This Pursuit seeks to better understand the relationship between forest loss and local-scale governance by assessing indicators of institutional quality at the subnational scale for 772 municipalities across the Brazilian Amazon. Their proposed research investigates the hypothesis that institutional quality, when assessed at the municipality scale with a robust set of indicators, will improve predictive models of deforestation rates and fragmentation indices. By incorporating governance-adjusted deforestation rates in a deforestation model, they can (1) evaluate the effectiveness of governance indicators in improving model accuracy, and (2) simulate deforestation projections under a variety of governance scenarios.
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