Conference Agenda

Agricultural commodity booms can improve rural employment and livelihoods but also accelerate land-use change in rural areas. Where land-use rights are unclear and economic institutions non-cohesive, such booms can trigger social conflict over land. We investigate this phenomenon in Indonesia, where rising global demand for palm oil caused a large expansion in production area over the past decades. Based on a yearly panel of 2,755 rural sub-districts from 2005 to 2014, we link highly detailed data on local outbreaks of conflict to variations in plantation expansion incentives. We show that local incentives to establish new plantations lead to violent disputes over land, resources, and political representation, an effect that is distinct from the impact of income shocks in already established production areas. The adverse consequences increase with the importance of land rents as an income source and are more pronounced in areas where land is more contestable and unequally distributed, as well as during local elections. Our findings underline the importance of Indonesia’s ongoing land reform efforts and the necessity of rural land transformation to go hand in hand with conflict mitigation strategies.

The factors determining the allocation of renewable energy facilities and their effects are questions of growing interest. This paper delves into the critical imperative of transitioning to renewable energy amidst global climate change concerns. Despite global commitments, challenges arise, including substantial costs, behavioral shifts, institutional barriers, lobbying influence, and local resistance. Using data on all wind farms and solar farms installed in Spain and electoral results at the municipal level from 1991 to 2019, we conduct a diff- in-diff event-study to determine the effect of siting these facilities on different electoral outcomes. Our findings reveal that siting a wind farm results in an electoral loss of 2.2 percentage points for the party incumbent at the regional level, while the local incumbent faces no significant punishment. However, when we perform heterogeneity estimation based on political alignment, the electoral loss increases to 4.8% for the party holding office at the regional level on those municipalities in which both layers of government are aligned, while the local incumbent in aligned municipalities experience a 2.2% loss of their vote-share.