Gender Inequality, Land Distribution, and Who Gets State Funds to Stop Deforestation in Argentina

ALCAÑIZ, ISABELLA; GUTIÉRREZ, RICARDO A.

New Orleans

Encuentro; REPAL 2019 Annual Meeting; 2019

REPAL - Red para el Estudio de la Economía Política de América Latina

Who gets paid by the state? To answer this question, this article looks at how land owners in Argentina access state-funded Payments for Environmental Services (PES) in exchange for not logging native forests. We argue that gender and class are critical determinants in the distribution and amount of state-sponsored anti-deforestation PES. Drawing from the political economy of land distribution, gender politics, and extensive subnational field research in Argentina, we develop a theory at the intersection of gender inequality and land concentration. While the literature on environmental justice tells us that women tend to have less access to state resources to fight environmental deterioration, here we propose that gendered access to public funds will be contingent on levels of land concentration and the aims of the PES program. Given that the Argentine forest PES program targets smaller land holdings more so than larger ones because of insufficient funding, we expect female agricultural producers to benefit from this. We intuit that lower levels of land concentration in a province will increase women?s access to the distribution of anti-deforestation monies, because women landowners are fewer and have smaller holdings on average than men. Furthermore, we speculate that women with smaller properties may also benefit from positive bias (i.e., perceived as deserving more help because of their gender) by the provincial government deciding the amount of money each beneficiary receives. Thus, we expect the PES to reveal a compensatory effect in its implementation at lower levels of land concentration. We remain agnostic to any gendered effects of the forest PES when it is implemented among larger landowners in a province.