Property rights and collective action in watersheds

According to the authors, "watersheds define a terrain united by the flow of water, nutrients, pollutants, and sediment. Watersheds also link foresters, farmers, fishers, and urban dwellers in intricate social relationships. Both factors—the biophysical attributes and the policy and institutional environments—shape peoples' livelihoods and interactions within the watershed." In this brief the authors show that "watersheds have such broad impacts at so many levels, they raise special issues for the management of resources through collective action." They explore the relationships between property rights, collective action, watershed management, and stakehold participation and conclude that empowering local communities to take a leading role in watershed management is essential. from Text.Collective behavior ,Poverty alleviation ,Property rights ,Collective action ,Empowerment ,stakeholders ,

Collective action in space: assessing how collective action varies across an African landscape

This paper develops and applies a new approach for analyzing the spatial aspects of individual adoption of a technology that produces a mixed public-private good. The technology is an animal insecticide treatment called a “pouron” that individual households buy and apply to their animals. Private benefits accrue to households whose animals are treated, while the public benefits accrue to all those who own animals within an area of effective suppression. A model of household demand for pourons is presented. As a private good, household demand for the variable input depends upon output price, input cost, and household characteristics. Input costs for pouron treatments include both the market price of the pourons and the transaction costs that the household must incur to obtain the treatments. Demand also depends upon the way that each household expects its neighbors to respond to one's own behavior. Free-riding is expected in communities with no tradition or formal organization to support collective action. Greater cooperation is expected in communities that have organizations that reward cooperative behavior and punish deviant behavior. Data for estimation of the model were collected for all of the 5,000 households that reside within the study area of 350 square kilometers in southwest Ethiopia. Geographic reference data were collected for every household using portable Geographic Positioning System units. GIS software was used to generate spatial variables. Variables for distance from the household to the nearest treatment center and number of cattle-owning neighbors within a 1-kilometer radius of the household were created. The density of cattle-owning neighbors was used as a measure of the potential benefits from cooperation; this variable was expected to have a positive effect on household pouron demand in communities able to support effective collective action and a negative effect in communities not able to support effective collective action. A set of community binary variables was interacted with the density variable to capture differences between communities. The results confirm the importance of the household-level variables. The results also indicate large differences in ability to cooperate between local administrative units. Everything else equal, the areas least able to cooperate were located farthest from the treatment center, were ethnically heterogenous, and had a different ethnic composition than areas around the treatment centers.

Sediment Management for Southern California Mountians, Coastal Plains and Shoreline. Part D: Special Inland Studies

In southern California the natural environmental system involves the continual relocation of sedimentary materials. Particles are eroded from inland areas where there is sufficient relief and, precipitation. Then, with reductions in hydraulic gradient along the stream course and at the shoreline, the velocity of surface runoff is reduced and there is deposition. Generally, coarse sand, gravel and larger particles are deposited near the base of the eroding surfaces (mountains and hills) and the finer sediments are deposited on floodplains, in bays or lagoons, and at the shoreline as delta deposits. Very fine silt and clay particles, which make up a significant part of the eroded material, are carried offshore where they eventually deposit in deeper areas. Sand deposited at the shoreline is gradually moved along the coast by waves and currents, and provides nourishment for local beaches. However, eventually much of this littoral material is also lost to offshore areas. Human developments in the coastal region have substantially altered the natural sedimentary processes, through changes in land use, the harvesting of natural resources (logging, grazing, and sand and gravel mining); the construction and operation of water conservation facilities and flood control structures; and coastal developments. In almost all cases these developments have grown out of recognized needs and have well served their primary purpose. At the time possible deleterious effects on the local or regional sediment balance were generally unforeseen or were felt to be of secondary importance. In 1975 a large-scale study of inland and coastal sedimentation processes in southern California was initiated by the Environmental Quality Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and the Center for Coastal Studies at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This volume is one of a series of reports from this study. Using existing data bases, this series attempts to define quantitatively inland and coastal sedimentation processes and identify the effects man has had on these processes. To resolve some issues related to long-term sediment management, additional research and data will be needed. In the series there are four Caltech reports that provide supporting studies for the summary report (EQL Report No. 17). These reports include: EQL Report 17-A Regional Geological History EQL Report 17-B Inland Sediment Movements by Natural Processes EQL Report 17-C Coastal Sediment Delivery by Major Rivers in Southern California EQL Report 17-D -- Special Inland Studies Additional supporting reports on coastal studies (shoreline sedimentation processes, control structures, dredging, etc.) are being published by the Center for Coastal Studies at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California

The Non-Linear Risk of Mortality by Income Level in a Healthy Population: US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey mortality Follow-up Cohort, 1988-2001

Background: An examination of where in the income distribution income is most strongly associated with risk of mortality will provide guidance for identifying the most critical pathways underlying the connections between income and mortality, and may help to inform public health interventions to reduce socioeconomic disparities. Prior studies have suggested stronger associations at the lower end of the income distribution, but these studies did not have detailed categories of income, were unable to exclude individuals whose declining health may affect their income and did not use methods to determine exact threshold points of non-linearity. The purpose of this study is to describe the non-linear risks of all-cause and cause-specific mortality across the income distribution. Methods: We examined potential non-linear risk of mortality by family income level in a population that had not retired early, changed jobs, or changed to part-time work due to health reasons, in order to minimize the effects of illness on income. We used data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1988–1994), among individuals age 18–64 at baseline, with mortality follow-up to the year 2001 (ages 25–77 at the end of follow-up, 106 037 person-years of time at risk). Differential risk of mortality was examined using proportional hazard models with penalized regression splines in order to allow for non-linear associations between mortality risk and income, controlling for age, race/ethnicity, marital status, level of educational attainment and occupational category. Results: We observed significant non-linear risks of all-cause mortality, as well as for certain specific causes of death at different levels of income. Typically, risk of mortality decreased with increasing income levels only among persons whose family income was below the median; above this level, there was little decreasing risk of mortality with higher levels of income. There was also some variation in mortality risk at different levels of income by cause and gender. Conclusion: The majority of the income associated mortality risk in individuals between the ages of 18–77 in the United States is among the population whose family income is below the median (equal to $20,190 in 1991, 3.2 times the poverty level). Efforts to decrease socioeconomic disparities may have the greatest impact if focused on this population

Property rights, collective Action, and poverty: The role of institutions for poverty reduction

"This paper presents a conceptual framework on how institutions of property rights and collective action can contribute to poverty reduction, including through external interventions and action by poor people themselves. The first part of the paper examines the initial conditions of poverty, highlighting the role of assets, risks and vulnerability, legal structures and power relations. The latter part investigates the decision-making dynamics of actors—both poor and non-poor—and how they can use the tangible and intangible resources they have to shape their livelihoods and the institutions that govern their lives. The paper concludes with a discussion of how attention to property rights and collective action can improve the understanding of outcomes in terms of changes in wellbeing." authors' abstractCollective action, Property rights, Poverty reduction, Conceptual framework, Vulnerability, Power, Institutions, Wellbeing,