1 Elite capture risk and mitigation in decentralized forest governance regimes 1 2 Lauren Persha 1 and Krister Andersson 2 3 4 1 Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3220. lpersha@email.unc.edu 5 6 2 Department of Political Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0333 7 8 9 NOTE: This is a pre-edited version of a paper that is now published as: 10 11 Persha, L. and Andersson, K. 2014. Elite capture risk and mitigation in decentralized forest governance 12 regime. Global Environmental Change 24:265-276 13 14 15 Abstract 16 Recent scholarship focuses on elite capture as a driver of social inequality and a source of policy failure across a 17 wide range of governance initiatives. In the context of environmental governance, concerns center on perceived 18 links between elite capture and decentralization, particularly in developing countries where decentralized 19 natural resource governance has been widely implemented. But, there is limited empirical knowledge regarding 20 if, and the conditions under which, decentralization might promote elite capture, or whether institutional design 21 factors can militate against it. We examine how local institutional arrangements under forest sector 22 decentralization affect the risk of elite capture of forest benefits, as well as the potential for a key institutional 23 design factor (linkages to external organizations as an accountability-building mechanism) to mitigate this risk. 24 We analyze forest product harvesting data as well as social, ecological, and institutional data from pre- and post- 25 decentralization across 56 forests and 174 community groups in four countries. We employ hierarchical linear 26 modeling to test the extent to which decentralization is associated with inequities in the distribution of forest 27 harvest benefits within communities, and to characterize the institutional arrangements that affect elite capture 28 outcomes. We find strong evidence for increased local rule-making under decentralization, but also significantly 29 higher risk of elite capture. The risk increases with the time passed since the decentralization reform, but it is 30 also substantially moderated in cases where an external organization was involved in organizing the local forest 31 group. Our findings highlight ways in which decentralization reforms are filtered by institutional arrangements 32 to produce different outcomes, and generate new knowledge on micro-institutional factors that can reduce the 33 risk of elite capture in decentralized environmental governance regimes. 34 35