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Policy Brief: The Amazon has a diverse array of social and environmental initiatives that adopt forest-based land-use practices to promote rural development and support local livelihoods. However, they are often insufficiently recognized as transformative pathways to sustainability. This brief 1) identifies the key factors that enable these place-based initiatives to achieve successful social-ecological outcomes and 2) suggests policies to better support these grassroots efforts in addressing environmental and social challenges in the region, such as: • Promoting policies that prioritize and empower local grassroots leadership in sustainability initiatives. • Encouraging diversification in activities and partnerships to increase resilience and impact. • Promoting collaboration across different governance levels and sectors to support sustainability efforts. 

Abstract Scholars and practitioners often promote direct engagement between policymakers, health workers and researchers as a strategy for overcoming barriers to utilizing scientific knowledge in health policy. However, in many settings public health officials rarely have opportunities to interact with researchers, which is a problem further exacerbated by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. One prominent theory argues that policy actors will trust and utilize research findings when they perceive them to be salient, credible and legitimate. We draw on this theory to examine the conditions facilitating greater uptake of new knowledge among health officials when engagement is out of reach and they are instead exposed to new ideas through written mass communication. Using data from a survey experiment with about 260 health workers and administrators in Honduras, we find that messages from a technocratic sender based on statistical evidence improved perceptions of salience, credibility and legitimacy (SCL). Additionally, perceptions of SCL are three contextual features that operate as joint mediators between knowledge and action, and several individual characteristics also influence whether officials trust research findings enough to apply them when formulating and implementing health policies. This research can help inform the design of context-sensitive knowledge translation and exchange strategies to advance the goals of evidence-based public health, particularly in settings where direct engagement is difficult to achieve. 

Strong local institutions are important for the successful governance of common-pool resources (CPRs), but why do such institutions emerge in the first place and why do they sometimes not emerge at all? We argue that voluntary local leaders play an important role in the initiation of self-governance institutions because such leaders can directly affect local users’ perceived costs and benefits associated with self-rule. Drawing on recent work on leadership in organizational behavior, we propose that voluntary leaders can facilitate a cooperative process of local rule creation by exhibiting unselfish behavior and leading by example. We posit that such forms of leadership are particularly important when resource users are weakly motivated to act collectively, such as when confronted with “creeping” environmental problems. We test these ideas by using observations from a laboratory-in-the-field experiment with 128 users of forest commons in Bolivia and Uganda. We find that participants’ agreement to create new rules was significantly stronger in group rounds where voluntary, unselfish leaders were present. We show that unselfish leadership actions make the biggest difference for rule creation under high levels of uncertainty, such as when the resource is in subtle decline and intragroup communication sparse. 

So­cial, bio­phys­i­cal, and in­sti­tu­tional con­texts af­fect for­est users’ in­cen­tives to work to­gether to re­store forests. With re­newed gov­ern­ment com­mit­ments to sup­port such ac­tiv­i­ties, we ar­gue that ef­fec­tive in­ter­ven­tions need to con­sider sev­eral con­text-spe­cific fac­tors – such as the user groups’ fu­ture dis­count rates, op­por­tu­nity costs, and col­lec­tive-ac­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties – be­cause these fac­tors will help de­ter­mine the ef­fec­tive­ness of such in­ter­ven­tions. To test the ef­fects of a suite of con­tex­tual fac­tors, we an­a­lyzed ob­ser­va­tions from 184 dif­fer­ent groups in 133 forests across eight de­vel­op­ing coun­tries. We find that the com­bi­na­tion of cer­tain en­abling fac­tors in­creases the prob­a­bil­ity of users un­der­tak­ing for­est im­prove­ment ac­tiv­i­ties, and that so­cial con­texts can con­di­tion the ef­fect of in­sti­tu­tional and bio­phys­i­cal con­texts. Our find­ings carry im­pli­ca­tions for the de­sign and im­ple­men­ta­tion of fu­ture in­ter­ven­tions to re­store forests in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries.