Sacred Ecology

Neha Deopa and Daniele Rinaldo

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Can religions shape ecosystems? We explore the role religious beliefs play in human-environment interactions by studying African Traditional Religions (ATR), which place forests within a sacred sphere. We focus on the unique case of Benin, whose history is deeply intertwined with traditional religions and where adherence is reliably reported. By exploiting three sources of exogenous variation in Benin's exposure to Charismatic Pentecostalism, we find that increase in ATR adherence yields positive changes in both forest and tree canopy cover. This increase is driven by sustainable land use policies rather than cooperation and shared governance mechanisms. To understand how ATR beliefs shape the way individuals combine the sacred and the ecology in their preferences, we build a theoretical framework of deforestation with heterogeneous pro-environmental attitudes driven by ATR adherence. Bringing the model to the data, we estimate that without any ATR adherence Benin would experience a loss of 10% of its tree canopy area, and would exhibit unsustainable deforestation rates. Our results show how ATR beliefs can play a fundamental role in forest and ecosystem conservation.

Date: 2023-11, Revised 2025-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev, nep-env and nep-evo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.13673 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2401.13673

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().