Leadership and Trade-Offs Between Social–Ecological Outcomes in Community-Governed Forests

Abstract

I explore the effect of leadership on the trade-off between social and ecological outcomes of community driven efforts in governing forests globally. I do so by using logistic regression and QCA (qualitative comparative analysis) for the analysis of cross-sectional data from the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program. While the net effect of leadership on the trade-off in forestry outcomes is significant, there are multiple causal paths via which various factors influence the trade-off in forestry outcomes. Some of these paths take place in the presence of leadership, while the presence or the absence of leadership is irrelevant for the rest of the paths. This finding indicates that leaders often play an important role in the decisionmaking process during the governance of forests, especially when hard decisions need to be taken.