The impact of Protected Areas on Deforestation? An Exploration of the Economic and Political Channels for Madagascar's Rainforests (2001-12)

Protected Areas (PAs) remain the central instrument to protect Madagascar's threatened biodiversity. We combine matching and regressions in a quasi-natural experiment setting to analyze PAs' additionality annually between 2001 and 2012 and study the channels that moderate the impact. PAs' have allowed to stabilize deforestation around a positive without having halting it. They have recreating some law effectiveness in areas where initial law enforcement was the lowest, limiting what we call opportunistic deforestation. However, additionality decreases when poverty rates increase. Effectively stopping deforestation will require ambitious policies to trigger the necessary agricultural transition for the country