The politics of drought in Brazil: Experimental evidence on municipal omission from the Northeast "semi-arid".

The semi-arid region of the Brazilian Northeast currently faces one of the worst droughts in decades, a climatic phenomenon that has severely affected the livelihood of many of its 20 million inhabitants spread in 1348 municipalities. The largely agrarian region has periodically suffered extreme drought - a vulnerability aggravated by its disproportionate levels of extreme poverty. Since global climate change will likely increase the intensity of these droughts, as well as their frequency, the Brazilian f ederal government has made abundant resources available to local governments to both deal with the social consequences of the drought and prepare for future extreme climatic events. Yet local governments exhibit striking variation in the degree to which t hey accept central government drought-relief and drought-preparedness funds and the extent to which these funds are spent competently and honestly. The Brazilian case suggests that simply offering resources to governments is not sufficient motivation for them to implement policies that mitigate the effects of climate change. Given the importance of government response to extreme weather phenomena, the wide variation in local government behavior observed in the region raises two important puzzles: 1) Why are some democratically elected mayors more willing to seek out resources to protect their citizens than others? and 2) Why do some democratically elected governments fail to effectively spend the funds on preventig the consequences of drought? To answer these questions, we propose the combination of panel surveys, field and natural experiments in order to answer our hypothesis. Our design brings new methods to the study of the interaction between national efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate chan ge and local political dynamics. Additionally, it could provide invaluable information to policy-makers about the effectiveness of their climate-related initiatives.