Authors: Neugarten, Rachel; Rasolofoson, Ranaivo;Vieilledent, Ghislain;Barrett, Christopher;Rodewald, Amanda;

The majority of the world’s tropical forests are located in fragile nations that have suffered repeated political crises. Given the importance of tropical forest ecosystems for biodiversity, climate mitigation, and livelihoods, it is critical to understand what kinds of conservation interventions are resilient during times of political crisis. We investigated the relative effectiveness of two conservation interventions: community forest managed areas (CFM) and national parks (MNP), in the island nation of Madagascar, a country characterized by globally significant biodiversity, high levels of deforestation, and repeated political crises. Using panel data on deforestation and forest fragmentation derived from remote sensing, we conducted statistical matching and a difference-in-differences analysis to isolate the causal impact of CFM areas and matched MNP during the political crisis. Preliminary results indicate that CFM areas performed worse than MNP in terms of reducing deforestation during a political crisis, but better in terms of reducing forest fragmentation. This unexpected result may be due to different threats experienced by CFM areas and MNP in Madagascar. If our results hold up to planned robustness checks, then our findings indicate that hybrid conservation approaches combining traditional government-managed MNP with community-managed areas might be the most resilient during times of crisis.