Green Infrastructure and Forest Loss in a Conflict-Affected Frontier: The Matebe Hydropower Project and the Limits of the Energy– Conservation Promise

Green infrastructure-energy projects designed to deliver development benefits while easing pressure on natural resources-is widely promoted as a way to reconcile energy access with forest conservation in fragile, conflict-affected states, yet evidence on whether such projects deliver their promised environmental benefits remains scarce. This paper examines the Matebe run-of-river hydropower plant near Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a donor-backed project designed to displace charcoal, raise local incomes, and support peacebuilding. Using a harmonized 5 km grid-cell panel for 2010-2020, I implement a spatially explicit Difference-in-Differences design that separates the construction phase (2013-2015) from the operational phase (2016-2020). Three findings emerge: deforestation rises near the project during construction, consistent with accessinduced clearing along the corridor to the park boundary; the operational period shows no detectable environmental dividend, as nighttime lights reveal no local electrification response; and the estimated association depends heavily on the choice of comparison group, since distant peri-urban references are structurally unlike treated forest cells. The results indicate that the environmental risks of green infrastructure in forest frontiers are front-loaded into construction, while the promised conservation benefits may not materialize on policy-relevant timescales-with direct implications for how environmental safeguards are sequenced and how conservation infrastructure is evaluated.