As populations grow, extending the reach of the state to a larger and more dispersed population becomes increasingly challenging. Many developing countries have responded by creating new subnational administrative units, bringing local administrators physically closer to citizens. Leveraging an episode of district proliferation in Uganda, this paper studies whether geographical proximity to local government administrative centers improves access to public goods and services and changes citizens’ engagement with government. To establish causality, I exploit a policy implementation rule that generated exogenous variation in households’ proximity to new district headquarters. Households living closer to these centers have significantly better access to electricity, roads, health facilities, and water sources. Proximity also shifts engagement from contentious to participatory channels and reduces direct experiences of corruption. Despite these gains, proximity does not increase trust in government or improve democratic perceptions, including in politically aligned districts where engagement effects are stronger. Finally, each district split raises transfers to the pre-split district territory by roughly 14 percent, with most of the increase concentrated in administrative expenditures rather than service delivery budgets.

Protected areas are central to global conservation policy, yet evidence on decentralized forest conservation remains limited. In many countries, local governments can designate protected areas while national governments retain authority over land allocation. This paper studies what happens when the authority to protect land is decentralized but the authority to allocate it is not. Combining annual land cover data, parcel-level titling records, and nearly 99,000 judicial rulings, we study Municipal Protected Areas in Bolivia using staggered difference in differences. We find that designation modestly reduces deforestation but does not prevent national land titling. In protected areas without indigenous territories, titling of commercial and medium-sized properties triples after designation, while small property titling remains unchanged. Titled land is subsequently cleared at similar rates inside and outside protected areas. Titling is initiated by private claimants and faces little apparent legal contestation, with no judicial ruling challenging titles granted inside municipal protected areas. Where protection overlaps indigenous territories, titling does not increase, and the national land agency defends indigenous tenure in court. These findings suggest that indigenous territorial rights provide an institutional constraint on national land allocation that is absent under municipal protection alone.

In 2011, Bolivia became the first country to select its highest court judges by popular vote, aiming to democratize justice and strengthen judicial legitimacy. This paper studies whether the reform affected the courts’ capacity to check the executive. Using the universe of high-court rulings since 2000, I compare outcomes in politically sensitive cases before and after the reform in a difference in differences setting. Preliminary findings suggest that, after the reform, the constitutional court became more likely to rule in favor of the government in cases where political power is directly at stake, including removal from office and electoral disputes. In the criminal chamber of the supreme court, appeals filed by accused public officials became more likely to be admitted and to succeed. These patterns are not present before the reform and become stronger under the second cohort of elected judges. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the popular election of judges, combined with government control over candidate pre-selection, may have facilitated political capture rather than strengthened checks and balances.

While property rights interventions have been a dominant way to redistribute costs and benefits from forests and address conservation challenges especially in working forests, the evidence of their effectiveness to date remains sparse. In this paper, we address this gap by providing rigorous evidence of the impacts of two such interventions: the establishment of commercial logging rights and voluntary market-based certification, specifically certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Applying rigorous difference-in-difference methods for staggered treatment designs, we use data from 15 tropical countries, where we conducted synchronized research (meta-keta) aligned with each country’s specific theory of change. We show that the establishment of logging rights does not exacerbate forest loss. We find limited evidence of FSC’s impacts on stalling forest loss. However, we note the significant heterogeneity by colonial past and economic development stage. Further, we demonstrate the importance of controlling for country specific covariates based on each country’s theory of change. Our work has important implications for the design and implementation of global conservation and development interventions.

This review identifies key data gaps and methodological challenges in collecting data on livestock in the context of household and agricultural surveys, with emphasis on livestock enumeration, product quantification and valuation, and labor. Drawing on consultations with international experts and stakeholders, as well as a review of nine prominent survey instruments, including those from the 50x2030 Initiative, the Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA), and the Agricultural Integrated Survey (AGRIS), the review highlights critical gaps in measuring live weight, milk production, by-products, and gender-disaggregated labor in addition to revealing limited or inconsistent coverage in critical areas such as herd dynamics, livestock systems, feed, and animal health. The review also indicates emerging methodologies, including digital apps, AI-powered computer vision, mechanized tools, and remote sensing, and discusses their feasibility for integration in large-scale household and agricultural survey operations. The objective of the review is to inform future methodological research efforts aimed at validating scalable and cost-effective innovations for improved livestock data collected through national agricultural surveys, such as those supported by the 50x2030 Initiative.