Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia

This book explores the breakdown of the institutions that govern natural resource exports in developing states.

Michael L. Ross (Author)

9781107404816, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 July 2012

256 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

'This book offers a clear understanding of how natural-resource management in developing countries cannot be managed solely on a political basis, but must involve responsible and ethical foresters.' The Journal of Asian Studies

Scholars have long studied how institutions emerge and become stable. But why do institutions sometimes break down? In this book, Michael L. Ross explores the breakdown of the institutions that govern natural resource exports in developing states. He shows that these institutions often break down when states receive positive trade shocks - unanticipated windfalls. Drawing on the theory of rent-seeking, he suggests that these institutions succumb to a problem he calls 'rent-seizing' - the predatory behavior of politicians who seek to supply rent to others, and who purposefully dismantle institutions that restrain them. Using case studies of timber booms in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, he shows how windfalls tend to trigger rent-seizing activities that may have disastrous consequences for state institutions, and for the government of natural resources. More generally, he shows how institutions can collapse when they have become endogenous to any rent-seeking process.

1. Introduction: three puzzles
2. The problem of resource booms
3. Explaining institutional breakdown
4. The Philippines: the legal slaughter of the forests
5. Sabah, Malaysia: a new state of affairs
6. Sarawak, Malaysia: an almost uncontrollable instinct
7. Indonesia: putting the forests to 'better use'
8. Conclusion: rent seeking and rent-seizing.

Subject Areas: Social impact of environmental issues [RNT], Political economy [KCP], Regional studies [GTB]