DDIG: Privatizing the Commons? Mexico's Forestry Ejidos 15 Years After Agrarian Counter Reform

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Graduate student Maria L. DiGiano, under the guidance of Dr. Marianne Schmink, will undertake research on the relationship between land tenure change and deforestation. The goal is to examine closely the multi-scalar relationships between national policy change, local institutional responses, individual attitudes towards privatization and forest resources, and impacts on the physical landscape. The impact of changing property regimes on natural resource management warrants attention as governments devolve authority of natural resource management to local communities and as policy makers and donor agencies support the privatization of common property. These land tenure changes could potentially threaten forest conservation because an estimated 25 percent of the world's forest resources currently belong to or are managed on a communal basis. The researcher will conduct her research in Mexico, where 80 percent of forest resources are held collectively. In 1992, legal changes in Mexico's 1910 common property laws permitted privatization of common lands (ejidos) for the first time in over half a century. The study will employ land cover change analyses, statistical analyses, and ethnography to link broad-scale changes in land tenure regimes and forest cover with fine-scale variations in attitudes and perceptions regarding rights and resources. The research objectives are to examine: 1) the range of land tenure outcomes following the 1992 reforms; 2) the drivers of land tenure change; 3) the correlation between land tenure change and changes in forest cover; and 4) attitudes and perceptions of property rights and forest resources among residents of 56 ejidos in southeastern Mexico. The research will help to develop social science theory that is able to connect relationships between humans and the natural environment across multiple scales. By examining in ethnographic detail the effects on ownership systems and forests of Mexico's 1992 agrarian counter-reform, this study also will help elucidate the consequences of devolution of natural resource management worldwide. The research also supports the education of a graduate student.