Voices in the Wilderness?

• In Event: Volatility and Policy-Making

Abstract

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment based on temporal and geographic variations in the spread of bears and wolves in France as the result of wildlife policies to study how exposure to negative externalities of environmental policies affect the type and intensity of backlash. I investigate when environmental policies with located costs have adverse consequences and examine how they can incentivize increasingly intense and violent forms of mobilization as local actors seek to maximize and maintain the extraction of compensatory transfers from the state. After total extinction during most of the XXth century, bears and wolves returned to the French national territory in the late 1990s. Due to specie-specific colonization patterns and habitat constraints, wolves have expanded geographically across all regions of Eastern France whereas bears cluster within a small mountainous area. Hence, the local intensity of the costs of the policy is constant across all affected regions in the wolf case while it increases exponentially with time as the population grows in the bear case. Wildlife policy allows me to study how the geographic spread and local intensity of negative externalities of environmental policies affect the likelihood and type of backlash. I hypothesize that local elected elites seek to maximize compensatory transfers. I show that when the spatial coverage expands with time (ex. wind turbines), national anti-environmental policy alliances are more likely to emerge. On the contrary, when the affected area is fixed (ex. nuclear waste facility), local elected elites are more likely to organize and sustain locally powerful organizations and lobbies mobilizing both directly impacted inhabitants and unaffected inhabitants. Furthermore, when local costs remain stable in time, mobilization is only temporary. When local costs increase in intensity with time, repertoires of contention become increasingly violent.

Author

• Lina Skoglund, Princeton University