Journal of Environmental Management 272 (2020) 111060 Available online 15 July 2020 0301-4797/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Research article Gender, land distribution, and who gets state funds to stop deforestation in Argentina Isabella Alca~ niz a, * , Ricardo A. Guti� errez b a Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, USA b Dean and Professor of the Escuela de Política y Gobierno, Universidad Nacional de San Martín and Independent Researcher of the CONICET, Argentina A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Payment for environmental services (PES) Land distribution Gender Native forests Deforestation Latin America Payment for Environmental Services (PES), a fnancial mechanism that pays stakeholders to conserve and protect ecosystem services, is a critical policy response to climate change. 1 In the fght against defor- estation, PES are used to pay landholders to not cut down trees in order to beneft from the ecosystems services associated with preserved for- ests, such as carbon storage, vegetation, and wildlife diversity. To implement successfully, landholders in areas where deforestation is intensifying must be targeted, yet research shows that access to climate remediation funds can be distorted by existing social inequities (Yang et al., 2018; Fortnam et al., 2019). Historically, land ownership has been skewed across gender and class lines (Kieran et al., 2017; Deere and Leon, 2003; and Agarwal, 1994). That is, men signifcantly outnumber women as titleholders and land tenure tends to concentrate in large holdings. Yet in recent times, gender mainstreaming and other policy interventions attempt to rectify past disparities by targeting women directly and generously (True and Mintrom, 2001; Poulin et al., 2016). Is the distribution of forest PES also skewed by gender and land concentration? Or as a government intervention, do forest PES in Argentina have a compensatory effect in favor of women and small agricultural producers? We answer these questions by analyzing how land owners in Argentina access state-funded Payments for Environ- mental Services in exchange for not logging native forests. 2 Drawing from the political economy of land distribution, gender politics, and subnational feld research in Argentina, we test for the ef- fect of gender and land concentration in the distribution of forest PES. We anticipate gender-based differences in access to public funds to be contingent on levels of land concentration and the aims of the PES program. As the Argentine forest PES program targets smaller land holdings more so than larger ones because of insuffcient funding and the goals of the program, we expect female agricultural producers –who are fewer and have smaller holdings on average than men– to beneft from this. 3 To test this expectation, we analyze a novel database of forest PES benefciaries across 22 provinces of Argentina from 2010 to 2017. 4 Our * Corresponding author. E-mail address: ialcaniz@umd.edu (I. Alca~ niz). 1 Throughout the paper we use interchangeably: payments for environmental services (PES) and plans (for conservation and sustainable management) as well as landowners, land holders, PES recipients/benefciaries, and agricultural producers. 2 A native forest (also known as a primary forest) is a “naturally regenerated forest of native species, where there are no clearly visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not signifcantly disturbed.” Trees in native forests were not planted by design. Rather they evolved over centuries and millennia and thus manifest signifcant levels of biodiversity. Native forests cannot be replanted once they are deforested. See the Forest Resources Assessment Working Paper #180 of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization at http://www.fao.org/3/ap862e/ap862e00.pdf. 3 Small agricultural producers are mentioned three times in the text of the 2007 Native Forest Law, which sets the objectives and requirements for the forest PES program in Argentina. See http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/135000-139999/136125/norma.htm. 4 Our analysis includes all forest PES disbursed from the start until 2017 for all provinces except the province of Buenos Aires, which only recently has joined the program, and the City of Buenos Aires. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Environmental Management journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jenvman https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111060 Received 28 January 2020; Received in revised form 2 July 2020; Accepted 4 July 2020