Resilience of Deforestation Reduction Policies Across Land Tenure Regimes: Evidence from the Post-2019 Policy Shock in the Brazilian Amazon

This paper examines the resilience of deforestation control policies across land tenure regimes in the Brazilian Legal Amazon, using Brazil’s post-2019 shift in environmental governance policies as a quasi-natural experiment. Combining high-resolution deforestation data with detailed tenure classifications, the analysis evaluates how land governance mediates deforestation outcomes under weakened enforcement and regulatory rollback. Using a difference-in-differences framework with spatial panel data and event-study specifications, the results reveal substantial heterogeneity across tenure regimes. Areas characterized by strong legal recognition—particularly homologated Indigenous territories and strictly protected conservation units—remain comparatively resilient, exhibiting stable or declining deforestation. In contrast, lands with weaker or incomplete property rights, including non-homologated Indigenous territories, agrarian settlements, and untitled public lands, experience significant increases in deforestation. The findings also highlight important within-land category variation, underscoring the role of formal recognition and cadastral validation in shaping environmental outcomes. Overall, the results demonstrate that the durability of deforestation reductions depends critically on the strength of land tenure institutions in the face of changing policy regimes.