The effects of scales, flows and filters on property rights and collective action in watershed management:

Research and policy on property rights, collective action and watershed management requires good understanding of ecological and socio-political processes at different social-spatial scales. On-farm soil erosion is a plot or farm-level problem that can be mitigated through more secure property rights for individual farmers, while the sedimentation of streams and deterioration of water quality are larger-scale problems that may require more effective collective action and / or more secure property rights at the village or catchment scale. Differences in social-political contexts across nations and regions also shape property rights and collective action institutions. For example, circumstances in the Lake Victoria basin in East Africa require particular attention to collective action and property rights problems in specific “hot spot” areas where insecure tenure leads to overuse or under-investment. Circumstances in the uplands of Southeast Asia require analysis of the opportunities for negotiating more secure rights for farmers in exchange for stronger collective action by farmer groups for maintaining essential watershed functions.

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.

Characterizing social networks and their effects on income diversification in rural Kerala, India

Social context is an important determinant of income diversification. In India, caste and ethnicity provide the basis for multi-functional social networks. This paper considers the effects of intra-village social networks on household income diversification in one of the poorest and most ethnically diverse areas of Kerala, India. Using techniques adapted from spatial econometrics, findings show that average diversification of a household’s social network has a positive effect on its income diversification by a factor of 3.6. Results of the study suggest that social stratification in villages with higher levels of stratification are associated with lower levels of income diversification

Impacts of HIV/AIDS on food consumption and wild food use in rural South Africa

HIV/AIDS can affect household food consumption in many ways, including through reductions in availability and quality of labour, reductions in earned income, and increased expenditure on medications. In rural South Africa, these negative effects can be buffered by social safety net programs provided by government and collection of wild foods. Despite some acknowledgement of the potential safety net role of wild foods, however, their contribution relative to other food sources in the context of HIV/AIDS remains underexplored. Here we report empirical findings from two rural communities in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to characterise food sources, intake and calories from 68 HIV/AIDS afflicted households and 87 non-afflicted households every quarter over 12 months. Results show that diets were moderately well-balanced though limited in variety, with cereal items contributing 52 % to total calorie intake. The bulk of food consumed by households was purchased, with supplementation from own production, collected wild vegetables and collected wild fruits. Up to 20 % of respondents from both HIV/ AIDS afflicted and non-afflicted households had insufficient daily caloric intake. Multivariate analyses show that, all else equal, individuals living in households afflicted by HIV/AIDS consumed fewer calories, had less diverse diets, and were more dependent on wild foods than those living in non-afflicted households. Given the detrimental effects of HIV/AIDS on income and home production, wild foods represent a free and readily available food source for vulnerable households