Indigenous Communities, Land Use and Tropical Deforestation (INCLUDE)

Project time period:
November, 2016 to October, 2021

This project is funded through the European Research Council Consolidator Grant Scheme, and runs over a five-year period from November 2016 until October 2021.

Tropical deforestation is an important contributor to climate change, through the release of significant amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. The main proximate cause of deforestation is agricultural expansion, followed by resource extraction. This project will look at the problem of deforestation in the Argentinean dry Chaco in the province of Salta (the Chaco Saltenho). The Chaco Saltenho, part of the Great American Chaco (the second largest tropical forest in the American continent after the Amazon), experiences one of the fastest deforestation rates in the world (on average about 2 football fields per minute over 1970-2015), represents an important agricultural frontier (with over 6 million ha of forest left) and hosts significant ethnic and cultural diversity, including both ‘criollos’ (small scale livestock farmers of European descent) and indigenous peoples (IPs).

The main objectives of the project are: to characterize the governance structures associated to land rights in the region; to characterize the stakeholders attitudes towards deforestation; to understand how governance structures affect actors decisions in terms of resources extraction and deforestation.

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GLP Themes: Land governance, Land use and conflict

GLP Methods: Decision Making, Econometrics, Institutional Analysis, Modelling, Participatory methods, Qualitative social science methods (interviews, observations, document review, surveys), Social network analysis

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