The World Bank and Forest Policy Reforms in Southern Latin America

Abstract

International organizations and their bureaucracies are considered key actors, directing patterns of global change. Among these organizations the World Bank is considered as perhaps the most influential actor bringing about certain types of changes in developing countries. In order to operate, the World Bank uses what is known as blueprints that are then implemented in many different countries with the expectation that they will produce the same results. In dealing with forest policy the World Bank has developed three forest policy initiatives: the 1978 forestry policy, the 1991 and the 2002 forests strategies. With the 2002 forests strategy they promoted private sector investments in forests, new environmental markets and voluntary private sector regulation. In the south of Latin America, the rapid expansion of plantation forests with exotic species observed since the beginning of the 90s was promoted by international actors, like the World Bank, by means of funding and capacity building with the aim of creating a pulp production region in Argentina and Uruguay. While the projects in both countries followed the same blueprint the results observed were very different. Previous research on policy change and bureaucratic reforms focused mainly on domestic factors as explanatory variables. However, international organizations like the World Bank are also important actors leading to domestic policy change. Hence, the aim of this work was to analyze, through process tracing, how the World Bank as an international organization influenced domestic forest policy change in the south of Latin America and how the interest of domestic actors influences the result of these interventions. Our results focused on two main sources of data: written documents and semi-structured interviews with experts. While the World Bank followed the same blueprint in both countries, our results show that the domestic coalitions and their power determine how effective the World Bank is.