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Representation and Forest Conservation: Evidence from India’s Scheduled Areas

Can representative institutions improve environmental conservation? We study the impact of a 1996 law that created local government with electoral quotas for Scheduled Tribes, a historically marginalized and impoverished community of 100 million in India. Using difference-in-differences designs paired with remote sensing data on deforestation, we find that formal representation reduces the rate of deforestation by thirty percent. These effects are larger in villages close to mines, where representation likely lowered commercial extraction. Combining these findings with research that the same institutions improved economic outcomes, our results challenge the commonly held assumption that there must be a trade-off between development and protecting the environment. While conservation policy tends to comprise environmentally focused institutions, we suggest more attention be given to umbrella institutions, such as political representation, which can address conservation and development in tandem.