Governing Natural Resources in South America: Distributive Politics and Unequal Consequences

This defense will be presented in person at Bren. Join us in Bren Hall 1424 or watch online using this link and passcode resource

ABSTRACT

In the tropical region of South America, market incentives have driven a rapid expansion of mineral extraction and agricultural forest clearing, raising fundamental questions about how state, private, and communal actors interact with each other in the governance process of resource extraction. This dissertation examines the governance of two critical issues—small-scale gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon and forest protection in Bolivia—to answer: (1) How does natural resource extraction generate unequal health impacts? and (2) How do electoral incentives and interest-group politics shape the implementation of land-use policies?
 
In chapter 1, coauthors and I use a Bartik instrumental variable design with cluster LASSO variable selection to isolate the effect of gold mining on health. We find that gold mining increases malaria, dengue, and Chikungunya prevalence among the general population. Gold mining negatively affects Indigenous populations in several indicators of newborn health, and the magnitude of impact increases with time. Mining has mixed impacts on newborn health among the general population. Our results highlight the broad, long-lasting, and unequal health effects of gold mining in the Brazilian Amazon.

Chapter 2 examines why forest protection policies are insufficiently enforced despite their adoption. Using a close-election discontinuity design and novel enforcement data, I show patronage as a mechanism of forest law non-enforcement: Bolivian municipalities that closely elected mayors who are aligned with the central government received fewer sanctions for illegal deforestation. Aligned municipalities have a higher proportion of illegal deforestation, indicating that land users strategically respond to differential sanctions. This work contributes to the literature on distributive politics and the political economy of deforestation.

In chapter 3, I explore whether sanctions for illegal deforestation are differentially applied across land user groups. Using two-way fixed effects and Cox proportional hazard models, I show that sanction risk varies by land user identity and violation size. While large deforestation events tend to be enforced more uniformly, smaller violations exhibit signs of selective enforcement. In addition, I highlight how multiple mechanisms of inequality—patronage, discretion, and marginalization—intersect in shaping enforcement.

BIO

Yifan (Flora) He is an environmental politics scholar focusing on land and natural resource governance in the Global South. She combines causal inference methods,  geospatial and remote sensing data, and qualitative interviews to advance knowledge in three areas: the distributive politics of environmental policy implementation; the social consequences of environmental degradation; and inclusive global conservation policy. She holds a Master of Science degree from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Social Science degree from the University of Hong Kong. In Fall 2025, she will join Georgetown University as an Assistant Professor.