Deforestation and resource disputes in Papua New Guinea

Disputes over land and other resources are common in poor areas of Asia and the Pacific, where common pool resources matter for livelihoods, property rights are poorly defined, and state capacity for dispute resolution is low. For example, in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the subject of the current study, one‐quarter of households experience land disputes within a year and tribal fighting also happens frequently. About 7% of these land disputes result in deaths. The disputes are more common in poorer areas, even with lagged data on community wealth to mitigate contemporaneous effects of disputes on poverty. Linking geo‐referenced household survey data on resource disputes with remote sensing observations on forest losses in the local area over the prior 10 years shows higher dispute rates in places with greater forest loss. One driving force for this deforestation lies outside of these communities (due to a sharp increase in log exports as PNG became the largest exporter to China after other countries quit the tropical logs trade) so the empirical correlation plausibly shows effects of deforestation on resource disputes rather than the reverse.