Subverting Local Institutions: Arresting Social Capital Formation and Environmental Conservation in Latin America

Much of what is written about local institutions for natural resource management in the developing world is more an exercise in celebration than in analysis. That said, it cannot be denied that rural communities in various places have managed to establish their own arrangements for handling environmental conflicts that, left unresolved, would diminish agricultural output, the quality of forest management, and so forth. Hayami (1990), for example, calls our attention to the contributions that local rules for water allocation have made to irrigated rice production in Southeast and East Asia.