The Impact of Rural Electrification on Deforestation and Soil Fertility By Andrew M. Tanner MPP Essay Submitted to Oregon State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Public Policy Presented November 16, 2015 Master of Public Policy essay of Andrew M. Tanner presented November 16, 2015 1 APPROVED ____________________________________________ Dr. Alison Johnston, representing political science ____________________________________________ Dr. Elizabeth Schroeder, representing economics ____________________________________________ Dr. Brent S. Steel, representing political science 2 Abstract Deforestation and loss of soil fertility are two forms of environmental degradation with global importance. Theories of environmental degradation commonly cited in public and academic discourse have historically emphasized the role of human populations and national economic development as being the primary drivers of environmental damage. This thesis utilizes quantitative techniques and a dataset with global scope to assess evidence supporting a different hypothesis: that lack of access to basic electric services in rural areas is a key explanatory factor in assessing deforestation and soil fertility loss. This hypothesis is drawn from the intellectual tradition of political ecology, which emphasizes the material conditions faced by people constrained by exploitative political economic systems, siting the penultimate driver of environmental destruction under the purview of global systems of power, economic and cultural in nature. This thesis seeks to meld the insights of political ecology with contemporary research standards in comparative politics to identify an alternative to environmental policies, which focus on market expansion or population control as means to mitigate environmental degradation. 3 Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................................................5 Conceptualizing Environmental Degradation: Deforestation and Soil Fertility Loss....................6 Deforestation and Soil Fertility Loss: Drivers and Consequences..................................................7 Competing Theoretical Explanations for Environmental Degradation.........................................10 A Missing Link?: Political Ecology and Environmental Degradation...........................................14 Rural Electrification as a Proxy for Human-Needs Focused Rural Development.........................18 Methods..........................................................................................................................................20 Analytical Results..........................................................................................................................24 Discussion......................................................................................................................................33 Policy Implications and Conclusion..............................................................................................35 Works Cited...................................................................................................................................48 Appendix........................................................................................................................................42 4 Introduction Contemporary explanations for environmental degradation tend to emphasize one of two explanations - either the problem is rooted in overpopulation, which causes increased resource demand in order to sustain populations, or it is due to the natural progress of economic development, which requires increasing environmental use until populations become sufficiently wealthy that they can afford to pay the high costs of environmental protection. Even explanations that accept multi-causal processes such as the popular "IPAT" formulation (Impact = Population + Affluence + Technology) accept overpopulation and economic development as being at the core of environmental degradation. However, since the 1980s an increasing number of scholars have contributed to the burgeoning field of political ecology, an interdisciplinary area which has sought to counter over-simplified causal explanations of environmental degradation that fail to address what political ecologists view as a crucial explanatory factor: the social and economic structural conditions that mediate local people's use of the environment in order to meet basic human needs. This thesis seeks to apply a broadly political ecological understanding to a quantitative dataset, controlling for oft-cited degradation factors of population and economic wealth to assess on a comparative basis these factors against one that broadly impacts local people's need for direct consumption of environmental resources - rural electrification. It is the intent of this work to examine the effect of rural electrification in determining levels of deforestation and soil fertility loss observed at a country level, utilizing a World Bank dataset with global coverage. It will make the case that rural electrification can serve as a proxy for a mode of rural governance emphasizing people's access to basic public services, a particular political-economic relationship which reduces material demands on landscapes and decreases resistance to state policies promoting environmental protection. Governance is a key factor affecting environmental degradation as the implementation of policy measures often have material impacts on the natural world, directly or indirectly limiting - or enabling - exploitation of natural resources. By applying quantitative methods more commonly associated with evaluations of environmental degradation that emphasize economic and demographic effects, it is argued that local political-economic conditions mediate land user reliance on local landscapes and so are an important and under-examined causal factor in environmental degradation. 5 Conceptualizing Environmental Degradation: Deforestation and Soil Fertility Loss The rapid uptake and spread of industrial manufacturing processes, beginning in 19th Century Europe and moving to encompass most of the rest of the world within the next hundred years, dramatically accelerated forest loss - to the point that upwards of 70% of original temperate zone forest cover was gone by the time the 21st Century began (Goudie, 2006). Tropical forests now face the fastest rates of degradation and the bleakest future, with more than half anticipated to be gone by the mid 21st Century (Goudie, 2006; United Nations, 2005). The social welfare implications of this ongoing degradation are clear: Deforestation is not only a serious threat to achieving sustainability, but also to progress towards hunger and poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods, as forests provide food, water, wood, fuel and other services used by millions of the world’s poorest people." (United Nations, 2000) Perhaps surprisingly, 'Deforestation' is not always a clearly defined concept, although the term is widely used (Brown & Zarin, 2013). When speaking at a regional national level, as is often done in the literature, there arises a problem that Brown and Zarin (Brown & Zarin, 2013) identify as being tied to notions of 'gross' deforestation or 'net' deforestation. Basically, this problem comes down to one of clustering observations into a statistic: if one counts all 'untouched' forest observations as forests, then any modification to these is 'deforestation' in a 'gross' sense. But if one also counts reforested or afforested areas as being forest as well, this then refers to deforestation in a 'net' sense. This distinction is important because most statistics available at a national level report net deforestation.(Brown & Zarin, 2013). This work by necessity adopts a 'net' deforestation definition - that is, if its total forest area decreases between years it experienced deforestation, and vice-versa - as using country-level data obfuscates dynamics within a country, leaving only the reported total change in forest area observed. Soil fertility loss is a potentially devastating form of degradation, but harder to characterize than deforestation, given the effectively invisible nature of shifts in chemical constituents within soil. Unlike forest loss, which can be observed in a fairly straightforward manner via satellite based remote sensing, measuring soil fertility requires physical samples to be obtained and analyzed in multiple locations and, if one seeks to understand change in soil fertility, at multiple points in time as well (Benjaminson et al, 2010; Manlay et al, 2007; Poudel et al, 2002; 6 Zingore et al, 2011). An indirect measure of soil fertility loss can be made by examining the rate of application of inorganic fertilizers to cropland, as these are typically applied to either replace nutrients which have been lost over time or to enhance existing soils beyond their natural capacity for agricultural production (Taddese, 2001; Zingore et al, 2011). Deforestation and Soil Fertility Loss: Drivers and Consequences Deforestation causes have been widely examined in the literature, from a variety of perspectives. Economic drivers play a role in deforestation, and illegal logging has been identified as one of the biggest drivers of deforestation in the tropics (Burgess et al, 2012; Lynch et al, 2013). Legal logging is certainly driven by similar, if not the same, price and cost pressures (Celentano et al,