The Multilevel Politics of Enforcement: Environmental Institutions in Argentina

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329219894074
• Author: Belén Fernández Milmanda,Candelaria Garay
• Published date: 01 March 2020
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329219894074

Politics & Society

2020, Vol. 48(1) 3 –26

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329219894074

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Article

The Multilevel Politics of

Enforcement: Environmental

Institutions in Argentina

Belén Fernández Milmanda

Trinity College

Candelaria Garay

Harvard University

Abstract

Environmental protection presents a challenge for commodity-producing democracies.

To account for the enforcement of environmental laws in decentralized systems, this

article proposes a multilevel approach that highlights the importance of national laws

and subnational implementation rules to the politics of enforcement. This approach

contrasts with prominent scholarship that focuses on sanctions and the electoral

incentives and bureaucratic resources of enforcers. The advantages of the multilevel

approach are demonstrated by the enforcement of the native forest protection

regime (NFPR) in the Argentine Chaco Forest, which is shaped not only by whether

sanctions on illegal deforestation are applied by subnational authorities but also by

the design of both the national law and subnational regulations. The article employs

quantitative data and case studies based on extensive fieldwork to show how affected

subnational organized interests influenced the design of the NFPR and the provincial

regulations that weaken or strengthen enforcement.

Keywords

deforestation, Latin America, enforcement, environmental politics, agricultural

producers, conservationists

Corresponding Author:

Candelaria Garay, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA

02138, USA.

Email: Candelaria_garay@hks.harvard.edu

894074PASXXX10.1177/0032329219894074Politics & SocietyFernández Milmanda and Garay

research-article2019

4 Politics & Society 48(1)

The protection of the environment in the context of growing international demand

for commodities has posed important challenges for Latin American democracies.

Driven by spiking prices and technological innovations, the rapid expansion of crop-

lands and cattle ranching has contributed to a rise in social conflict1 and has led

governments throughout the region to adopt environmental legislation, including

forest protection laws.2 Those institutions are especially challenging because they

impose constraints on land use in a region that exhibits both the highest potential for

agricultural expansion and the highest levels of land inequality in the world.3 In light

of prominent scholarship arguing that institutions in many Latin American countries

are weak, meaning that they are unstable and fail to structure behavior,4 a key ques-

tion concerns the conditions under which environmental rules achieve higher levels

of enforcement.

To address this question, we focus on the enforcement of forest protection legisla-

tion in the Argentine Chaco Forest. Covering 60 percent of the Chaco Americano, the

largest forestland and biomass reservoir outside tropical areas in the southern hemi-

sphere,5 the Argentine Chaco accounts for 88.5 percent of the country’s forest loss.6

Under pressure from environmental activists seeking to curtail depletion in the Chaco

Forest, the National Congress of Argentina sanctioned a native forest protection

regime (NFPR) in 2007. The NFPR required provinces to pass implementation regula-

tions, classify forest areas according to their conservation value, and establish enforce-

ment agencies.

We propose a multilevel approach to understanding the politics of enforcement in

decentralized systems characterized by weak institutions. Unlike prevailing views that

focus on state capacity and the electoral incentives of local authorities in charge of

applying sanctions for noncompliance, we argue that enforcement can best be under-

stood by analyzing the politics surrounding the design of the law as well as the rules

implementing it across levels of government. The politics of a law’s design and imple-

mentation, of which enforcement is a critical component, may be more connected than

typically acknowledged. Our framework further draws attention to the role of orga-

nized interests favoring or hindering enforcement.

Applying our multilevel framework to the enforcement of the NFPR, we find that

subnational organized interests—conservationist coalitions resisting deforestation and

large producers seeking to expand agriculture into forestlands—strove to influence the

formulation of the national law and its implementation rules in order to enhance or

dilute its enforcement. As the NFPR was debated in the Congress, national environ-

mental NGOs participated in the law’s formulation and mobilized public opinion for

its approval. In turn, large producers who stood to bear the cost of enforcement tried

to block its passage or lessen its impact by securing greater discretion for subnational

governments in the law’s implementation. Compromise among legislators resulted in

a law with a conservationist goal but containing ambiguities that allowed provincial

governments to relax its enforcement significantly.

Governors charged with implementation have sought primarily to diffuse pres-

sures from competing provincial-level organized interests—large producers and con-

servationist coalitions—by exploiting the ambiguities of the NFPR in the design and