The effects of roads on indigenous people's well-being and use of natural resources: A natural experiment in lowland Bolivia

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Dr. Ricardo Godoy (Brandeis University), Dr. Ori Heffetz (Cornell University), and Dr. Victoria Reyes-Garcia (Brandeis University) will undertake research on the impacts of road construction on indigenous peoples in low-income nations. Road construction advocates argue that new roads facilitate market access, promote economic development, and improve health and well-being. Detractors contend that new roads have many negative ecological and social consequences. To help resolve this debate, the researchers will use a natural experiment created by the imminent construction of a road through a national park inhabited by three different native Amazonian groups in Bolivia.The project will take place over a period of three years in villages inhabited by Tsimanee, Yuracaré, and Moxeños peoples, in Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure. The study will commence in 2010 before the road is built, with the collection of baseline social and ecological data. In 2011 and 2012, after construction has been completed, annual follow-up surveys will be carried out to determine the road's immediate impacts. Measures of well-being will include measures of (a) village income and status inequality, (b) intra-household income disparities, (c) individual cash income, (d) social capital, and (e) psychological adjustment. Measures of natural resource use will include changes in the extraction of natural resources for sale and for consumption. To leverage the research opportunity afforded by this natural experiment, the researchers will invite other researchers to request that additional data be collected on particular topics of interest for other research questions. Thus while this project focuses on immediate and short-term effects of road building, it also will create a significant data repository for other researchers to assess medium and long-term effects. In addition, the research program supports the training of three doctoral students. The construction of roads through native Amazonian territories has polarized defenders and critics of road building in particular, and development more generally, into two camps. A single study on such a complex topic cannot resolve the debate, but by providing before-and-after data, this project will provide an empirical basis for an eventual resolution.