ABSTRACT
Current social policy is virtually invisible in the deforestation literature, but it serves analytically as a proxy for thinking about other forms of domestic transfers: remittances, and other state welfare, retirement and transfer payments. They can also serve as proxies for understanding the effects of REDD more generally. Prior to REDD initiatives, and for many areas outside of REDD financing, various kinds of transfers, including migration, remittances and state transfers, have had a substantive impact on forest trends. In the case of Puerto Rico, these were instrumental in changing the countryside to a ‘post-agricultural landscape’ (Aide et al. 1996, Rudel et al. 2000, Grau et al. 2003, Lugo 2009). This dynamic of declining clearing and enhanced forest recovery is well documented for El Salvador (Hecht and Saatchi 2007) and exemplified in Figure 4, which leads us to the question of forest resurgence (Figure 4).
