University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 The Political Economy Of Amazon Deforestation: Subnational Development And The Uneven Reach Of The Colombian State Javier Revelo-Rebolledo University of Pennsylvania Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Political Science Commons, and the Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons Recommended Citation Revelo-Rebolledo, Javier, "The Political Economy Of Amazon Deforestation: Subnational Development And The Uneven Reach Of The Colombian State" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3511. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3511 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3511 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Political Economy Of Amazon Deforestation: Subnational Development And The Uneven Reach Of The Colombian State Abstract The recent peace process between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has prompted radical changes in the country’s Amazon region. A decrease in violence has been accompanied by an increase in deforestation, suggesting that good things do not always come together. My dissertation studies the political economy of Amazon deforestation through a cross- disciplinary analysis linking studies of modern state formation with tropical deforestation. As such, it offers an empirically grounded explanation for differential levels of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon. Employing a mixed-methods research strategy, I reviewed historical archives on regional development, interviewed more than ninety local leaders in the region, and produced an original geodatabase on cumulative forest loss. This empirical strategy allowed me to measure Amazonian deforestation since the 1970s and systematically compare Caquetá and Putumayo, which are the two most similar departments with different levels of cumulative deforestation. Based on this research design, this dissertation suggests that an explanation of different levels of cumulative deforestation needs to seriously consider both the degree and the type of territorial integration. Cumulative deforestation and territorial integration tend to be high in departments like Caquetá and Putumayo, which transitioned from extractive economies to agrarian colonization in the first decades of the twentieth century. Both cases were economically and politically similar until the mid-1950s, when their economic and political incorporation trajectories and corresponding levels of deforestation began to diverge as a result of the different integration strategies promoted by the Colombian state between 1948 and 1982 during the ‘developmental era’. Cumulative deforestation in Caquetá (compared to Putumayo) tends to be higher because both the state and market forces succeeded in establishing an integration trajectory based on the farming of livestock. This research has the potential to improve our understanding on the geopolitical drivers of Amazon deforestation. Contemporary explanations that emphasize the withdrawal of the FARC are incomplete insofar as they fail to recognize that the guerilla organization used to be very influential in both departments and that deforestation in post-conflict Colombia has not increased equally. My dissertation also illustrates the necessity of avoiding the geographical determinism characteristic of much recent political science research and recognizing that geographical phenomena can sometimes be endogenous to the discipline’s most important variables of interest. An increasing interest in environmental issues has the potential to compel scholars and policy makers to better understand exactly how geography matters, both socially and politically. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Political Science First Advisor Tulia G. Falleti Keywords Amazonia, Colombia, Conflict, Deforestation, Development, State Strength Subject Categories Latin American Languages and Societies | Latin American Studies | Political Science | Urban, Community and Regional Planning This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3511 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMAZON DEFORESTATION: SUBNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE UNEVEN REACH OF THE COLOMBIAN STATE Javier Revelo-Rebolledo A DISSERTATION in Political Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ Tulia G. Falleti The Class of 1965 Endowed Term Professor of Political Science Graduate Group Chairperson ______________________ Alex Weisiger Associate Professor of Political Science Dissertation Committee Rudra Sil, Professor of Political Science Devesh Kapur, Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies and Director of Asia Programs, Johns Hopkins University THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AMAZON DEFORESTATION: SUBNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE UNEVEN REACH OF THE COLOMBIAN STATE COPYRIGHT 2019 Javier Revelo-Rebolledo This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/us/ iii For my Mom, my first teacher iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There were many people and organizations that made it possible for this thesis to come to fruition. First of all, I would like to thank Tulia Falleti, my thesis supervisor at the University of Pennsylvania. Her generous advice guided the elaboration of my dissertation at every stage: the delimitation of a novel object of study, the elaboration of a rigorous research project, the implementation of creative field work, and writing a clear and in-depth argument. I am particularly grateful for countless meetings and her detailed reading of every one of my drafts. Her work ethic, discipline and generosity, her analytical and methodological clarity, and her ability to identify weaknesses in my ideas, were fundamental inputs to find the difficult balance between theory and empirical research. I also would like to thank Rudra Sil and Devesh Kapur, the other two members of my doctoral committee. The three of them believed in this project from the beginning and encouraged me to study a relatively new topic in the discipline. Rudra Sil helped me develop and understand the theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions of this thesis. His comments allowed me to connect my research question with debates that transcended the region of study. I thank Devesh Kapur for asking the most difficult questions, which I doubt I have fully answered. If this thesis does not reproduce many problems of contemporary environmentalism, it is, to a large extent, thanks to his deep understanding of rural economies in developing countries. Naturally, the errors are my responsibility. This dissertation would not have been possible without the vital support of many members and departments of the University of Pennsylvania. I am particularly grateful to the School of Arts and Sciences, the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy (former Program for Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism), the Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics for their generous financial and institutional support. I also want to thank Professors Rogers Smith, Jeffrey Green, Robert Vitalis and Dorothy Kronick, who have always contributed to my academic career even without being part of the doctoral committee. In Penn, I also had the fortune to make new friends and develop my ideas with them from the early stages. I am grateful to Osman Balkan, Matthew Berkman, Guzman Castro, Santiago Cunial, Victoria Gilbert, Ashley Gorham, Matthew Kavanagh, Sergio Mukherjee, Prakirti Nangia, Isabel Perera, Thea Riofrancos, Nathaniel Shils, Zachary Smith, and Joanna Wuest for so many enriching conversations. I owe a special thanks to Aniruddha Jairam, Carly Regina, Yu Zeng and Robinson Woodward-Burns, my intercultural family in Philadelphia. Thank you for opening the doors of your worlds and for teaching me that it is possible to live with our differences. All you need is love or, at least, to let others be. In Colombia my debts are many. Firstly, I thank the state officials and social leaders who generously shared their perceptions and life experiences with me. They showed me the importance of considering the legacies of the past and doubting about over simplistic statements. I sincerely hope that the peace experienced in the region while I implemented my fieldwork can become a consolidated reality. v My debts in Colombia go beyond this doctoral thesis. I thank the Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia) for teaching me that academic research should be socially relevant. My work with professors Rodrigo Uprimny, Juan Jaramillo, César Rodríguez, and Mauricio García Villegas was particularly influential. I owe Mauricio a special thank you for believing in me and for closely accompanying my academic process for more than one decade. Thank you for teaching me that the sociology of law and political sociology have much in common and that, in countries like Colombia, the study of territorial unevenness is paramount to understanding state power. In Dejusticia I also met good