Category: Journal article Page 2 of 3

There is growing use of economic incentives such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) to encourage sustainable land management. An important critique is that such approaches may unintentionally disrupt environmental and social values, ‘crowding out’ pre-existing motivations to conserve. Some scholars suggest that the use of in-kind payments and norm-based framing, rather than financial transfers and a market framing, can mitigate these risks. There are calls to use more robust methods for impact evaluation in environmental policy. We use one of the only Randomized Controlled Trials of a conservation incentive scheme to evaluate its impact on self-stated environmental and social values and beliefs. Data from before and after the intervention, from households in villages randomly selected to receive the program or not, demonstrate that the program increased prioritization of environmental values (evidence of crowding-in as opposed to crowding out) and altered social beliefs related to inequality and the role of government. The findings demonstrate that this conservation program had a positive impact on environmental values and increased the belief that government involvement is appropriate. The scheme, with its use of in-kind payments and reciprocity framing, offers lessons to those seeking to develop effective schemes to incentivize positive environmental stewardship.

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Flooding disasters in urban and suburban Dakar have been prioritised in various policy actions over the last two decades. Our research aimed to generate a historical overview of the progressive transformations of flood governance in Dakar. We found that flood governance policies have gone through three main phases, each representing a paradigm shift: the ‘emergency-relief’ phase, the ‘water-pull-out’ phase, and the ‘live-with-water’ phase. We argue that the second phase, which began in 2012, was supported by an engineering approach, where fresh water was literally pulled out using large-scale drainage infrastructure. This can be considered the ultimate stage of the conquest of urbanisation over nature. The resulting situation was a clear reduction in flood exposure, giving rise to smaller disasters. A new form of land competition also developed in the areas that were drained of water. These areas required the inclusion of local stakeholders into flood management processes. Although both the government and international partners have invested efforts in trying to coordinate flood management, the distribution of competences across several ministries and a lack of cooperation is provoking a “vertically divided authority”, leading to overlapping mandates and competition among state and non-state agencies. From 2014 onwards, what we called the ‘live-with-water’ phase supported the greater inclusion of local stakeholders and a change in articulation, which tried to consider water not as a threat but as a resource. The conclusion of this paper calls for the development of locally centred flood management bodies (including grass-root organisations and municipalities) as well as a more elaborate and complex articulation of the physical and institutional temporalities and scales of flood management.

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Neoclassical economic interpretations of Payment for Environmental Services (PES), which assume that participants weigh up costs and benefits, are making room for more complex analyses. However, there is still little evidence of how PES programmes interact with existing motivations to conserve, the extent to which funded conservation is additional, and the likely permanence of changes. We categorized the outcome of contracts aiming to reduce cattle grazing in riparian forest (n = 428) and deforestation (n = 912) by Bolivian farmers in terms of whether they were unsuitable, non-compliant, non-additional, or additional (the holy grail of PES programmes) and explored the relationship between farmers’ reported motivations and the extent to which the conservation funded was additional. Up to 39% of contracts to exclude cattle, and 14% to prevent deforestation appear to be additional. Where participation is motivated by the instrumental values of nature (such as provision of clean water) contracts to exclude cattle from riparian forest are more likely to represent additional conservation. We suggest that the programme is partly acting as what we term ‘payment for environmental self-service’; i.e. the external incentives enable changes in behaviour motivated by farmers’ perceptions of environmental benefits they receive from the management changes incentivized.

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In the last decade, sub-Saharan African countries have taken various measures to plan for and adapt to floods in order to reduce exposure and its impacts on human health, livelihoods, and infrastructure. Measuring the effects of such initiatives on social resilience is challenging as it requires to combine multiple variables and indicators that embrace thematic, spatial, and temporal dimensions inherent to the resilience thinking and concept. In this research, we apply a subjective resilience indicator framework and a before-after-control-intervention (BACI) evaluation to empirically measure the impacts of the “Live with Water” (LWW) project on suburban households in Dakar, Senegal. Our framework is based on an empirically measurable resilience index that combines anticipatory, adaptive, and absorptive capacity—considered as structural dimensions—with the concept of transformative capacity—considered as a temporal reconfiguration of the first three dimensions. Our finding let us estimate that the project increased the absorptive and the anticipatory capacities by 10.6% and 4.6%, respectively. However, adaptive capacity remained unchanged. This may be explained by the fact that the project was more successful in building drainage and physical infrastructures, rather than improving multi-level organizations and strategies to cope with existing flood events. Decoupling implementation time between physical infrastructures and longer term institutional and livelihood based support could both improve projects’ results and their evaluations.

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Large-scale agricultural investment (LSAI) involves complex trade-offs with regard to West African farmers’ livelihoods. Our research presents a robust impact evaluation of a biofuel investment in northern Sierra Leone. The LSAI case evaluated has been certified by the Roundtable of Sustainable Biomaterial and is noted for complying with several other international guidelines. A total of 882 households were surveyed in the treatment and control areas, and asked about their livelihood structures. Statistical results show that farmers in the LSAI area have reduced their agricultural area for food production, have lower yields, and need to spend more on external labour. By contrast, the LSAI-impacted villages present a clear increase in total monetary income, a perceived improvement in food and water security, and an increase in food consumption expenditure. However, the improvement in financial income was higher for landowners than for tenants, and access to wage labour was mainly given to men rather than women, suggesting that LSAI can potentially increase local inequalities. It is therefore not possible to speak about a linear impact in this case, but more of a transformation of livelihood structures toward a more wage-dependent system. The findings also support the idea that the enforcement of international guidelines on responsible investment is necessary to mitigate the negative consequences of LSAI on local livelihoods. Further efforts must also be made along these lines to create a security net, to prevent potentially harmful consequences in the case of operations shutting down.

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This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.

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The aim of this paper is to explore possible links between forest cover change and characteristics of social-ecological systems at sub-national scale based mainly on census data. We assessed relationships between population density, poverty, ethnicity, accessibility and forest cover change during the last decade for four regions of Bolivia and the Lao PDR, combining a parcel-based with a cell-based approach. We found that accessibility is a key driver of forest cover change, yet it has the effect of intensifying other economic and policy-related underlying drivers, like colonization policies, cash crop demand, but also policies that lead to forest gain in one case. Poverty does not appear as a driver of deforestation, but the co-occurrence of poverty and forest loss driven by external investments appears critical in terms of social-ecological development. Ethnicity was found to be a moderate explanatory of forest cover change, but appears as a cluster of converging socio-economic characteristics related with settlement history and land resource access. The identification of such clusters can help ordering communities into a typology of social-ecological systems, and discussing their possible outcomes in light of a critical view on forest transition theory, as well as the relevance and predictive power of the variables assessed.

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Cocoa production in Alto Beni, Bolivia, is a major source of income and is severely affected by climate change impacts and other stress factors. Resilient farming systems are, thus, important for local families. This study compares indicators for social–ecological resilience in 30 organic and 22 nonorganic cocoa farms of Alto Beni. Organic farms had a higher tree and crop diversity, higher yields and incomes, more social connectedness, and participated in more courses on cocoa cultivation. Resilience was enhanced by local farmers’ organizations, providing organic certification and supporting diversified agroforestry with seedlings and extension, going beyond basic organic certification requirements.

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Lands inhabited by indigenous peoples often have low population density but abundant natural resources. For those reasons, many actors have historically attempted to occupy those lands or use the resources in them. Increasing pressures over lands occupied by indigenous peoples have resulted in the awakening of indigenous peoples over their rights to land and resources generating many debates over indigenous peoples’ rights to land and self-governance. In this article, we provide a historical and geographical overview of territorial and governance issues among the Tsimane’, an indigenous group native to the Bolivian Amazon. We examine how the Bolivian state economic policies implemented during the 20th century affected the Tsimane’ ancestral lands, and how – over the late-20th century – the Bolivian state accommodated Tsimane’ claims to lands in between multiple interests. We show how national policies led to the reconfiguration of Tsimane’ territoriality and to a fragmented institutional representation. Current indigenous territories and indigenous political representation are an expression of conflictive policies that have involved multiple actors and their specific interests on indigenous lands and its resources.

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Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community‐level institutions regulate the trade‐offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio‐cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off‐farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market‐based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio‐ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation.

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