Research

Working Paper

Banking for Safety: Violent Crime and Bank Presence in Brazilian Municipalities (R&R from JDE)

Norina Furrer, Raphael Flepp, Egon Franck

In Brazil, I study whether expanding access to public banks can reduce violent crime. Using the rollout of a federal banking program into previously unbanked municipalities, I find that new public bank branches cut assault-related deaths by around 15%. The main channels are better access to credit, savings, and higher incomes—showing that financial inclusion and household resilience can be powerful tools for violence prevention, alongside traditional security policies.

The effectiveness of tree-planting PES in food supply chains (submitted to Nature Sustainability)

with Federico Cammelli, Thomas Addoah, Kambire Sami, Johann Six, and Rachael D Garrett

Tree-planting PES are now widely used by food companies to meet climate and agroforestry goals, but their real ecological impact is uncertain. We evaluate the first such program in a major cocoa supply chain in Côte d’Ivoire using data from 1,680 households and a quasi-experimental design. The program raised seedling-based tree density by about 30%, yet it did not curb native tree removal or increase species richness. While it improved attitudes, it left key social norms unchanged. Our findings show that tree-planting PES boost adoption but need conservation incentives and village-level engagement to generate lasting, socially anchored ecosystem gains.

Publication

Scaling out agroforestry and forest conservation in West Africa requires more transformative policy interventions in cocoa supply chains (published in Environmental Research: Food Systems, 2025) 

with Federico Cammelli, Thomas Addoah, Prisca Kouakou, Joss Lyons-White, Cécile Renier, William Thompson, and Rachael D Garrett

In West Africa’s cocoa belt, we examine why deforestation persists despite corporate commitments and new EU rules on zero-deforestation cocoa. We argue that most forest-focused supply-chain policies target the wrong scale, individual farmers and seedling distribution, while neglecting off-reserve forests, social learning, and village-level landscape dynamics. Our work calls for re-scaling interventions to the supply-shed (village) level and embedding agroforestry in a clear conservation hierarchy, so that policies align with how both ecosystems and communities actually function.

Published article, see here

On-going Projects

Social Dynamics Govern the Effectiveness of Payments for Ecosystem Service 

Norina Furrer, Radu Tanase, Federico Cammelli, Luca Lazzaro, Rachael Garrett

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are widely used to promote cocoa agroforestry, but farmer uptake remains uneven. In Côte d’Ivoire, we show that visible peer participation matters nearly twice as much as higher payments for farmers’ enrollment. Broad, lower payments that reach many farmers outperform concentrated high payments because they better activate social spillovers, highlighting social dynamics, not incentive size, as the key lever for effective PES design.

Policy-practice gaps jeopardize effectiveness and equity during cocoa sustainability implementations 

Norina Furrer, Joss Lyons-White, Federico Cammelli

As the EU Deforestation Regulation raises the bar for “zero-deforestation” cocoa, we study why major initiatives like the Cocoa & Forests Initiative in Côte d’Ivoire still struggle to deliver fair, effective outcomes. Using rich qualitative work in eight cocoa communities, we show how cooperative membership rules, audit routines, and land tenure uncertainties systematically exclude women, migrants, and forest-edge farmers. The problem is less farmer resistance than the way supply-chain rules are translated on the ground, pointing to the need for more inclusive, village- and landscape-level governance beyond member-only schemes.

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