This book is based on the premise that formal institutions in several Latin American democracies are weak; they are unstable and their capacity to shape actors’ behavior is limited. Institutional strength not only varies across countries, but also at the subnational level, as many institutions are unevenly enforced within countries (Bergman 2009; Amengual 2013, 2016; Holland 2017, this volume). Focusing on why some institutions take root in some places and not in others, we address the enforcement of forest protection legislation, a domain of environmental rules that has experienced important innovations in Latin America since the early 2000s.

As it boosted economic growth across the region, the commodity boom of the 2000s also intensified environmental degradation and sparked conflicts over the regulation of mining (see Amengual and Dargent, this volume) and the protection of forestlands jeopardized by the expansion of the agricultural frontier.