Conservation from the Bottom-Up: Human, Financial, and Natural Capital as Determinants of Resilient Livelihoods in Kigoma Rural, Tanzania

Rhetoric of community-based conservation has gained prominence among development specialists and environmentalists, yet such projects are often implemented from the top-down in Africa. This dissertation contends that only a bottom-up approach can foster resilient livelihoods and environmental stewardship. This study focused on determinants of household resilience within a poverty-stricken agricultural community near Gombe Stream National Park (GSNP) in western Tanzania. The research purpose was to explore: 1) relationships between villagers and GSNP management; 2) how groups and individuals view priority livelihood problems and solutions; 3) various attributes of households; and 4) perceived trends for household resilience and how these are related to natural, social, human, and financial capital as per the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF). A mixed-methods approach provided qualitative and quantitative assessments. Data collection consisted of Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and household surveys. The RRA was conducted adjacent to GSNP while other work was implemented over a larger area. Survey data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, chi square, and logistic regression. Regression examined relationships between trends in resilience variables (quality of life or ability to solve problems) versus trends in capital. Results from the RRA indicated high polarization and problems between villagers and GSNP management. A more complex picture, however, emerged from subsequent investigations revealing that the most important issues facing local communities were inadequate public services, ineffective leadership, and development isolation. This situation was exacerbated by population growth, poverty, and environmental decline. Regression results identified lack of income, manual labor, and skills and knowledge as factors undermining household resilience. Other data indicated a need for improving farming systems. In conclusion, while all forms of capital mattered to resilience, human and financial were most lacking. Knowledge of such variation strengthens future applications of the SLF. Practical implications include how an indigenous educational institution, the Gombe School of Environment and Society (GOSESO), could operate in the area. The GOSESO needs to adopt a bottom-up, participatory approach that emphasizes capacity building for poverty reduction and conservation. This could allow for broader goals of economic and cultural vitality, as well as environmental stewardship, to be achieved

Thermochemical and kinetic studies of perfluoroaromatic and halogen substituted perfluoroaromatic compounds.

Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1973 .Y24. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-13, Section: A. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1973

Uso comercial de espécies nativas: a experiência com o Paricá.

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The standard view of the political economy of public debt is that myopic and unconstrained politicians prefer to disregard intertemporal smoothing considerations and extract political rents as fast as possible. From this perspective, it seems that the world has much to celebrate, as most emerging market economies -- often suspect of having weak political institutions -- have chosen to save rather than waste most of their exceptional income from high commodity prices. Unfortunately, the optimistic conclusion that these countries may have turned the corner with respect to public resource management may be premature. In this paper we show that while it is true that in the long run there is a negative connection between the level of public debt and the quality of political institutions, this needs not be the case in the short run. Quite the opposite, in the short run, governments with weak political institutions are likely to save more than governments with better institutions facing the same uncertainty. This is due to an option value of rent-seeking whereby the prospect of potentially squandering funds in the future makes governments more "precautionary" today. We show that this result relies on three assumptions: Economic risk is high relative to political risk, markets are sufficiently incomplete, and there exists a rent-less policy-making regime.

Future Rent-Seeking and Current Public Savings

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a boom, leaving the economy unprotected in the event of a downturn. This view motivates a number of fiscal rules which are aimed at cutting deficits and constraining borrowing so as to limit the size of this political distortion. In this paper we study the determination of government debt and deficits in a dynamic model of debt which characterizes political distortions. We find that in our model the conventional wisdom always applies in the long run, but only does so in the short run when economic volatility is low. Instead, when economic volatility is high, a rent-seeking government over-saves and over-taxes along the equilibrium path relative to a benevolent government. Paradoxically, the over-saving bias can also be solved in this case by a rule of capping deficits, although the mechanism operates through its effect on expectations of future rent extraction rather than though the contemporary constraint. However, these rules are ineffective in solving the high taxation problem caused by the political friction, which in the short run is more acute in the high income volatility scenario.

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