Community forestry in Nepal: a policy innovation for local livelihoods

millions fed, food security, Community forestry, Civil society, CFUG,

Rural institutions, social networks, and self-organized adaptation to climate change

Support for rural livelihoods to adapt to climate change is a top policy priority around the world. We advance the concept of "self-organized adaptation" to analyze how long-term pathways of transformation come about as the organic outcome of farmers' incremental and continuous responses to climate and other challenges. Through an analysis of four decades' responses to changing climate conditions in an agricultural system of the Indian Himalayas, we show how several key policy interventions – institutional support for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge, investments in infrastructure, and strengthening of market linkages – have produced favorable conditions for successful, long-term self-organized adaptation to climate change. This has led to the transformation of an agricultural system specialized in apple production to one with a great diversity of fruit, vegetable, and food grain crops. We find that farmers growing these crops cluster into five distinct agricultural portfolios that reflect the constraints and opportunities that different farmers face, and which are patterned by interaction with rural institutions and household social networks. We highlight the role of distributed decision-making in shaping broader trajectories of systemic transformation, and we argue for the need to move beyond pre-defined climate interventions toward the identification of policy mechanisms that can support more effective self-organization over the long-term

Dark and bright spots in the shadow of the pandemic: Rural livelihoods, social vulnerability, and local governance in India and Nepal

The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented disruption to lives and livelihoods around the world. These disruptions have brought into sharp focus experiences of vulnerability but also, at times, evidence of resilience as people and institutions gear up to respond to the crisis. Drawing on intensive qualitative enquiry in 16 villages of Himalayan India and Nepal, this paper documents both dark and bright spots from the early days of the pandemic. We find intense experiences of fear and uncertainty, heightened food insecurity, and drastic reductions in livelihood opportunities. However, we also find a wide range of individual and collective responses as well as a patchwork of policy support mechanisms that have provided at least some measure of basic security. Local elected governments have played a critical role in coordinating responses and delivering social support, however the nature of their actions varies as a result of different institutional arrangements and state support systems in the two countries. Our findings highlight the changing nature of vulnerability in the present era, as demographic shifts, growing off-farm employment and dependence on remittances, and increasing market integration have all brought about new kinds of exposure to risk for rural populations in the context of the present disruption and beyond. Most importantly, our research shows the critical importance of strong systems of state support for protecting basic well-being in times of crises. Based on these findings, we argue that there is a need for greater knowledge of how local institutions work in tandem with a broader set of state support mechanisms to generate responses for urgent challenges; such knowledge holds the potential to develop governance systems that are better able to confront diverse shocks that households face, both now and in the future. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd

Alternative cereals can improve water use and nutrient supply in India

open7siHumanity faces the grand challenge of feeding a growing, more affluent population in the coming decades while reducing the environmental burden of agriculture. Approaches that integrate food security and environmental goals offer promise for achieving a more sustainable global food system, yet little work has been done to link potential solutions with agricultural policies. Taking the case of cereal production in India, we use a process-based crop water model and government data on food production and nutrient content to assess the implications of various crop-shifting scenarios on consumptive water demand and nutrient production. We find that historical growth in wheat production during the rabi (non-monsoon) season has been the main driver of the country’s increased consumptive irrigation water demand and that rice is the least water-efficient cereal for the production of key nutrients, especially for iron, zinc, and fiber. By replacing rice areas in each district with the alternative cereal (maize, finger millet, pearl millet, or sorghum) with the lowest irrigation (blue) water footprint (WFP), we show that it is possible to reduce irrigation water demand by 33% and improve the production of protein (+1%), iron (+27%), and zinc (+13%) with only a modest reduction in calories. Replacing rice areas with the lowest total (rainfall + irrigation) WFP alternative cereal or the cereal with the highest nutritional yield (metric tons of protein per hectare or kilograms of iron per hectare) yielded similar benefits. By adopting a similar multidimensional framework, India and other nations can identify food security solutions that can achieve multiple sustainability goals simultaneously.openDavis, Kyle Frankel; Chiarelli, Davide Danilo; Rulli, Maria Cristina; Chhatre, Ashwini; Richter, Brian; Singh, Deepti; DeFries, RuthDavis, Kyle Frankel; Chiarelli, Davide Danilo; Rulli, Maria Cristina; Chhatre, Ashwini; Richter, Brian; Singh, Deepti; Defries, Rut

Introduction: institutional choice and recognition in the formation and consolidation of local democracy

What are the democracy effects of 'decentralisation' reforms and projects? Most developing countries have launched decentralisation reforms for the purpose of improving service delivery, local development and management. In these reforms and projects, however, governments, international development agen­cies and large non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are transferring power to a wide range of local in­stitutions, including private bodies, customary authorities and NGOs. Recognition of these other local institutions means that fledgling local governments are receiving few public powers and face competition for legitimacy. Under what conditions is the new plurality of approaches and local interlocutors fostering local democratic consolidation or resulting in fragmented forms of authority and belonging? Through case studies in Benin, Guatemala, India, Malawi, Russia, Senegal and South Africa, this issue explores the effects of institutional choices and recognition by governments, international development agencies and large NGOs on three dimensions of democracy: 1) representation, 2) citizenship and 3) the public domain. This article outlines an approach to the politics of institutional choice and recognition while drawing out findings from the articles in this issue

Democracy on the Commons: Political Competition and Local Cooperation for Natural Resource Management in India

This dissertation explores the effects of democratic competition among political parties in India on natural resources and the ability of local communities to cooperate for natural resource management. A significant number of decentralization policies in developing countries depend for their success on local collective action for the provision of public goods. At the same time, democratization generates multiple impulses in society, and understanding its effects on the prospects for local cooperation is important for explaining the variation in success of decentralization policies for natural resource management. I use historical and ethnographic data to understand the influence of political competition on natural resource outcomes and local collective action. The descriptive analysis draws upon theoretical and empirical literatures on political competition, collective action, and property rights, and is used as the basis for generating hypotheses as well as specifying context-specific measurements of the relevant variables for statistical analysis. I test the hypotheses on two sets of dependent variables – local cooperation and forest condition – and three datasets covering community-based irrigation and forest management systems, co-management institutions for irrigation, soil conservation, and forest management, as well as state-managed forests as the null category without decentralized management. The findings show that an inclusive pattern of political mobilization and party competition have increased the salience of environment and forests in the public domain and democratic politics, with a positive effect on resource outcomes. Further, natural resources are better managed by decentralized institutions, compared to state management. However, communities located in highly competitive electoral districts find it significantly more difficult to cooperate due to interference from political parties. Moreover, communities that are heterogeneous along the salient issue dimension in democratic politics are the worst affected. On the other hand, better representation of sub-group interests in community affairs, prevalence of democratic practices, and linkages of community leaders to multiple political parties are associated with higher levels of local cooperation. In conclusion, the findings demonstrate that communities are better at natural resource management than state agencies, but the impulses generated by democratization can constrain the ability of local communities to manage natural resources.Dissertatio

Strengthening causal inference through qualitative analysis of regression residuals: explaining forest governance in the Indian Himalaya

This paper contributes to fertile debates in environmental social sciences on the uses of and potential synergies between qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches for theory development and validation. Relying on extensive fieldwork on local forest governance in India, and using a dataset on 205 forest commons, we propose a methodological innovation for combining qualitative and quantitative analyses to improve causal inference. Specifically, we demonstrate that qualitative knowledge of cases that are the least well predicted by quantitative modeling can strengthen causal inference by helping check for possible omitted variables, measurement errors, nonlinearities in posited relationships, and possible interaction effects, and thereby lead to analytical improvements in the quantitative analysis. In the process, the paper also presents a contextually informed and theoretically engaged empirical analysis of forest governance in north India, showing in particular the importance of institutional and historical factors in influencing commons outcomes.