Does Titling Private Property Spur or Stem Deforestation? Evidence from Bolivia

Over the past quarter century, policymakers have spent billions of dollars on initiatives aimed at providing formal legal title to landholders in the Global South. But evaluations of these initiatives have focused on socioeconomic outcomes, not environmental ones. We use official property-level cadastral records, fine-scale satellite data on land use, and heterogeneity-robust difference-in-difference estimators to analyze the effect of titling rural private properties on forest loss in Bolivia, a country with both a longstanding land titling initiative and exceptionally high deforestation rates. We find that the adverse effect of titling on forest cover was modest but nontrivial in the short term and potentially more substantial in the medium term. On the average property, titling boosted forest loss by 2329 hectares in the ten years after titles were awarded, a 78 percent increase over what would have occurred otherwise. Moreover, the magnitude of this effect increased monotonically during the 10-year event window. Results for other land uses suggest that agriculture was at least as important as pasture as a driver of forest loss associated with titling. Finally, we find that titling had particularly large deforestation effects on properties hosting large commercial farms and those in Santa Cruz department.