Deforestation and Resource Conflicts in Papua New Guinea

Conflicts over natural resources are common in developing countries, due to poorly defined property rights and limited state capacity for preventing conflict and because environmental incomes matter more to livelihoods than in rich countries. In Papua New Guinea (PNG), for example, the subject of the current study, almost one-quarter of households had land disputes in the previous 12 months, with disputes over agricultural and forestry resources, over development projects, and tribal fighting also frequently experienced. About seven percent of the land disputes and 40 percent of the tribal fights resulted in deaths. In this paper, geo referenced household survey data on disputes and conflicts, and remote sensing observations on forest losses in the local area over the prior ten years are used to show the frequency of conflict over natural resources, the distributional incidence of this conflict – whether rich or poor areas are more at risk – and the effect of large-scale environmental change, specifically deforestation, on the subsequent risk of conflict. A sharp increase in log exports, which saw PNG become the largest exporter to China as other countries withdrew from the tropical logs trade, represents an exogenous shock that helps to identify effects of deforestation on conflict rather than the reverse relationship.