Deforestation in Peru: Confronting the informal practices, state capture, and collusion

These include inadequate national and subnational public policies, road-building, land trafficking, and corruption.7 This U4 Brief focuses on how informal practices, state capture, and collusion influence the implementation of policies and programmes in the forest sector and the development of mining and agriculture in the Peruvian Amazon. [...] The local implementation of national policies in Latin America is closely connected to the capacity of central governments to reach, and negotiate with, subnational authorities and civil society.9 The success of such implementation is also partly dependent on political alignment between national and subnational authorities.10 In the environmental sphere, state capacity,11 the capacity of subnation. [...] Deforestation in Peru: Confronting the informal practices, state capture, and collusion 8 Exploring the informal relations at the national and subnational levels In the case of Peru, corporations typically benefit from standing alliances or power partnerships with the state – principally via relationships with the president and the Ministry of Economy.15 This results in the nomination of allies to. [...] Indeed, according to the Peruvian Ombudsman, 81% of provincial governors elected in 2022 faced accusations of corruption at the time of their election.20 In the Amazon, however, corruption allows deforestation.21 Casting the participation of provincial authorities in deforestation simply as ‘corruption’ would be to misunderstand the complex system of relations and collusion. [...] The bill directly undermines the authority of the Ministry of Environment regarding the use of forests in the Amazon.