Whose Rules? Which Forest? Why community rule-making predicts carbon on average but subsistence at the tail, and what that means for restoration finance

Abstract

Restoration finance is learning to reward communities that make their own forest rules, and the evidence backs it: across 314 forest commons in 15 tropical countries, local rule-making is among the most consistent predictors of good outcomes (Fischer et al. 2023). That evidence is an average, and the average hides who is governing for what. This working paper reproduces the published model exactly and then walks it down the tail: forests whose communities depend most on them for fodder, fuelwood, and timber (159), then those among them with low literacy (54). At the tail, rule-making stops predicting carbon and starts predicting subsistence. Across all forests, it raises the chance of the high-carbon cluster by 7.7 percentage points; in dependent, low-literacy communities, that association vanishes (−5.9 points; gap −13.6, 90 percent interval −23.9 to −5.5), while its association with subsistence nearly doubles, from 15.8 to 27.0 points. The communities that depend most on their forests make rules for what they depend on. A carbon program that pays for rule-making as if it were carbon will pay least where community governance is strongest. Rule-making should be judged by what it governs for, not by the single benefit a buyer wants.