This work offers a detailed case study on the dynamics of forest use, degradation, and loss in Northeast Luzon, Philippines. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study charts the degradation and loss of forest in this area between 1950 and 1990, as it relates to the social and political context of logging, forest migration, and changes in upland agriculture. Based on ten years of research, the author introduces us to the actions, livelihood options, and motives of all the principal group of actors.

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.