Starting Out

I've been blogging as a part of my teaching responsibilities for a
while, but I'm starting this blog up right now to keep friends, family,
and non-hostile onlookers posted on my whereabouts and activities as I
head off this month for a year of dissertation fieldwork in Bolivia,
Peru, and Guatemala (not in that order).

To begin, I will be heading to Guatemala on the 18th of June (less than
two weeks now--wow!) for about two months. What will I be doing
there? My dissertation will deal with the effects of forestry
decentralization, the dynamics driving forestry-related outcomes, and
factors (especially institutional factors) which produce desirable vs.
undesirable outcomes in forest governance.

In English: For years, policy makers in aid organizations have been
pushing governments in the third world to decentralize--to grant more
political power to local governments. The outcomes of these reforms
have sometimes been great, sometimes terrible, and often, pretty
mediocre. I'm setting out to better understand why decentralization
sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

And as a part of the process of studying decentralization, and trying to
figure out how the policy community can make it work better, I'll be
going to several municipalities in Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia to
figure out what's going on there, and I'll be talking to a lot of people
in those places, in the hopes of adding to the statistical analysis I'll
be conducting with survey data that's already been collected.

I will also be drinking lots of coffee (little known fact: coffee from
the Yungas region of Bolivia is the best coffee in human history),
eating lots of eggs (Guatemalan folks buy them by the case) and trying
to avoid other gringos--especially the ones wearing travel pants and
photography vests.