I am thankful to Craig Kauffman for an engaged review of Democracy in the Woods, especially for his articulation of the book’s novel contributions to the scholarship on institutional change. Kauffman’s theoretically rich paraphrasing of the main outcome analyzed in the book, i.e., forestland regimes, as the “institutions of territorial control,” is also greatly appreciated.

The points of discussions regarding methodological and analytical strategies that Kauffman brings up in the review are extremely important in the context of the goals of cumulative knowledge-building in the social sciences. The political economy of institutions framework, which incorporates theoretical insights from scholarship on institutional analysis, comparative politics, and development studies, was central to my efforts to engage meaningfully with the scholarship on institutional change. A theoretically grounded framework ensures that the numerous explanatory factors that Kauffman’s review lists do not remain disparate factors thrown into the kitchen sink, but are instead part of causal configurations logically connected to the outcomes over time and at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

The nature of the tradeoff between parsimony and depth of engagement is contingent on the level of development of any area of scholarship. Whether we already have sufficiently well-developed theories of institutional change that allow researchers to conduct empirical tests of institutional change in the arena of environmental policy regimes is a question worth debating. We should continue to weigh the utility of different types of evidentiary approaches depending on the stage of development in a theoretical field. Even so, I do not dismiss the importance of testing narrowly defined hypotheses. The findings reported in Democracy in the Woods include the results of statistical tests of specific hypotheses about the political and economic determinants of local forestland claims (Appendix V). On the other hand, I chose to publish separately the cross-national evidence that reinforces the book’s core arguments about political mediation of national forestland regimes (Prakash Kashwan, “Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment: A Cross-National Analysis,” Ecological Economics 131 [2017]). Including all of the available empirical evidence in the book’s core text would have left less space for a meaningful conversation with scholars in the fields of institutional analysis and development studies, who tend to value analysis of how political institutions actively shape what becomes of radical reforms and innovative policy proposals.

Facilitating a conversation among scholarship that cuts across disciplinary and methodological boundaries, while addressing questions that are theoretically salient and policy-relevant, are important goals pursued in Democracy in the Woods. Additionally, it is important to disentangle the normative agendas, often attached to environmental policies and programs, from the scholarly goals of examining the social and political drivers and the broader effects of various environmental policies and programs. This is important not just for maintaining the scholarly commitment to generating knowledge that is not driven by specific agendas, but also for making meaningful contributions to the long-term sustainability of the ongoing efforts to promote environmental protection. Scholars of environmental policy and politics have an important role in facilitating these broader and socially meaningful conversations.