Belén Fernández Milmanda, Ph.D.
belmilmanda@gmail.com
Assistant Professor
Trinity College (CT)
Year of PhD: 2019
Country: United States (Connecticut)
About Me:
I'm an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Trinity College. I'm interested in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on Latin America.I hold a Ph. D. in Political Science from Harvard University, a M.A in Political Science from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina and a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires.
Research Interests
Latin American And Caribbean Politics
Comparative Political Institutions
Political Economy
Environmental Policy
Interest Groups
Comparative Politics
Countries of Interest
Argentina
Brazil
Chile
My Research:
My book project looks at how agrarian elites organize to influence policy making in Latin American democracies. I compare landowners' electoral strategies to block redistributive threats in Argentina, Brazil and Chile since the Third Wave democratic transitions. I also study, together with Candelaria Garay, the political determinants of deforestation in the Argentine Chaco Forest. Our research analyzes sub-national differences in the enforcement of forest protection laws paying especial attention to how local actors shape the design and implementation of both federal and state-level environmental regulations. At Trinity, I teach courses on Latin American politics, political economy, environmental politics, the politics of inequality and qualitative methods.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Environmental protection presents a challenge for commodity-producing democracies. To account for the enforcement of environmental laws in decentralized systems, this article proposes a multilevel approach that highlights the importance of national laws and subnational implementation rules to the politics of enforcement. This approach contrasts with prominent scholarship that focuses on sanctions and the electoral incentives and bureaucratic resources of enforcers. The advantages of the multilevel approach are demonstrated by the enforcement of the native forest protection regime (NFPR) in the Argentine Chaco Forest, which is shaped not only by whether sanctions on illegal deforestation are applied by subnational authorities but also by the design of both the national law and subnational regulations. The article employs quantitative data and case studies based on extensive fieldwork to show how affected subnational organized interests influenced the design of the NFPR and the provincial regulations that weaken or strengthen enforcement.
In a context of booming commodity prices, what factors drive subnational authorities to implement forest protection regulations in active agricultural frontiers?. Focusing on one of the world’s deforestation hotspots, the Argentine Chaco Forest, we argue that subnational variation in the implementation of forest protection legislation is driven by governors’ attempts to avoid conflict produced by agricultural expansion. Through process tracing, we show how governors’ implementation decisions—regarding both the design and enforcement of provincial regulations—sought to mitigate pressures from large producers opposed to clearing restrictions and from various groups contesting agricultural expansion. As the power of these actors varies across provinces, governors’ conflict avoidance strategies resulted in markedly different subnational regulations as well as contrasting levels of enforcement and deforestation. We substantiate our argument through an empirical strategy that combines department-level geocoded data on deforestation and levels of forest protection in the Argentine Chaco with extensive fieldwork and interviews in the core provinces in which the forest is located. Our findings aim to contribute to academic debates in political science and environmental science on the determinants of subnational policy and deforestation, respectively, and have the potential to inform both donors and policymakers about the factors shaping the uneven impact of decentralized arrangements to combat climate change.
Book Chapters:
Focusing on why some institutions take root in some places and not in others, we address the enforcement of forest protection legislation, a domain of environmental rules that has experienced important innovations in Latin America since the early 2000s. As it boosted economic growth across the region, the commodity boom of the 2000s also intensified environmental degradation and sparked conflicts over the regulation of mining and the protection of forestlands jeopardized by the expansion of the agricultural frontier.
The historical role of landed elites as obstacles to democratic consolidation in Latin America has been widely studied. Four decades after the onset of the third wave, however, the issue of how these elites have adapted to the new democratic context remains unexplored. The question of why these elites who supported military coups each time a government threatened their interests have mostly played by the democratic rulebook during the past four decades still needs to be answered. Important structural and political transformations took place in Latin America during the last half of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century that affected agrarian elites’ incentives and capacity to organize politically. The first change was urbanization, which undermined agrarian elites’ capacity to mobilize the votes of the rural poor in favor of their political representatives. The second was an increase in the importance of agricultural exports as a source of foreign exchange and revenue for Latin American countries thanks to the commodity boom of the 2000s. The third change was the arrival to power of left-wing parties with redistributive agendas, threatening agrarian elites’ interests in the region with the highest land inequality in the world. However, the fact that these governments relied on revenues from agriculture to fund their policy agendas created tension between the leftists’ ideological preferences for a more equal distribution of land and their fiscal needs. Dominant theories in political science suggest that democratization should lead to redistribution from the rich to the poor, as democracies represent the preferences of a wider spectrum of citizens than nondemocracies. Landowners, given the fixed nature of their assets, should be easy targets for increased taxation or expropriation. However, these theories understate landowners’ capacity to organize politically and use democratic institutions to their advantage. In fact, if we look at contemporary Latin America, we see that four decades of democracy have not changed the region’s extremely high land inequality. Agrarian elites in Latin America have deployed a variety of political influence strategies to protect themselves from redistribution. In some cases, such as Chile and El Salvador, they have built conservative parties to represent their interests in Congress. In others, like Brazil, they have invested in multiparty representation through a congressional caucus. Lastly, in other countries such as Argentina and Bolivia, agrarian elites have not been able to organize their electoral representation and instead have protected their interests from outside the policymaking arena through protests.