Abstract In view of a continuing global decrease of forest cover, many authors mention forest governance as a basic concept contributing to reduced deforestation, specifically in the tropics. There are numerous definitions for forest governance. The concept is commonly understood as a broad approach and assessment tools comprise dozens of indicators. However, there is no information about relations between single indicators, their individual importance and whether contextual factors modify their effects. This article aims to analyze if the hypothesized relation between governance leading to reduced tropical deforestation in general holds true, to identify the most decisive governance components and to explore if the wider socio-economic and political context influences potential governance effects. The structure - agency concept is used as theoretical basis to identify underlying mechanisms and as conceptual basis for discussing individual indicators. We employ a quantitative literature review based on scientific articles on governance and deforestation. From a total of 810 articles we select the most frequently cited publications related to the subject. From the resulting 198 papers only those are studied that contain empirical relations between governance and deforestation. The remaining 28 studies are analyzed by applying the governance indicators of the World Resource Institute as categories for content analysis. Likert scores are used to quantify governance effects as input for subsequent principal component analysis and multiple linear regressions. Results show that indeed high governance scores frequently relate to lower rates of deforestation and we thus recommend continued political support for the concept. But the reviewed studies mostly focus on a smaller number of classical governance indicators, which suggests that the governance concept might benefit from streamlining into a more targeted approach. In this respect, several indicators were related to underlying principal components reflecting the agency and structure concept. Even though we cannot claim a statistically significant stronger effect of one or the other component, single structural indicators were more strongly and more consistently linked to reduced deforestation in comparison to agency related indicators. The concept can thus be helpful to guide policy design and implementation. We show this by applying it to the ongoing discussion on results based payments under REDD+ as a prominent example for agency related measures. The reviewed literature in addition suggests that governance effects are moderated by deforestation drivers such as corruption, illegal logging and population growth and by interventions like technology transfer.

中文翻译：

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治理对热带森林砍伐的影响：证据审查

摘要 鉴于全球森林覆盖率持续下降，许多作者提到森林治理是有助于减少森林砍伐的基本概念，特别是在热带地区。森林治理有多种定义。该概念通常被理解为一种广泛的方法，评估工具包括数十个指标。然而，没有关于单个指标之间的关系、它们各自的重要性以及背景因素是否会改变它们的影响的信息。本文旨在分析治理导致总体热带森林砍伐减少的假设关系是否成立，确定最具决定性的治理组成部分，并探讨更广泛的社会经济和政治背景是否会影响潜在的治理效果。结构 - 机构概念被用作识别潜在机制的理论基础和讨论单个指标的概念基础。我们采用基于治理和森林砍伐科学文章的定量文献综述。我们从总共 810 篇文章中选择了与该主题相关的最常引用的出版物。从由此产生的 198 篇论文中，仅研究了那些包含治理与森林砍伐之间的经验关系的论文。其余 28 项研究通过应用世界资源研究所的治理指标作为内容分析的类别进行分析。Likert 分数用于量化治理效果，作为后续主成分分析和多元线性回归的输入。结果表明，确实高治理分数通常与较低的森林砍伐率有关，因此我们建议继续对该概念提供政治支持。但审查的研究主要集中在少数经典治理指标上，这表明治理概念可能受益于精简为更有针对性的方法。在这方面，有几个指标与反映代理和结构概念的基本主成分有关。尽管我们不能声称一个或另一个组成部分在统计上具有显着更强的影响，但与机构相关指标相比，单一结构性指标与减少森林砍伐的联系更紧密、更一致。因此，该概念有助于指导政策设计和实施。我们通过将其应用于正在进行的关于 REDD+ 下基于结果的支付的讨论来展示这一点，作为机构相关措施的突出例子。此外，经审查的文献表明，治理效果受到腐败、非法采伐和人口增长等森林砍伐驱动因素以及技术转让等干预措施的影响。