Collective action and property rights for poverty reduction: A review of methods and approaches

"While much attention has been given to examining various aspects of poverty, a number of studies have shown that institutional environment in which the poor exist conditions welfare outcomes, thus highlighting the inherently crucial importance of institutions for poverty reduction. The institutions of property rights and collective action are among those identified as playing a major role in the livelihood strategies of the poor. This paper highlights ways to operationalize the conceptual framework developed by Di Gregorio and colleagues (2008), which provides an analytical tool to study poverty through the institutional lens with a special focus on collective action and property rights. By emphasizing the multidimensionality of poverty, the authors advocate the importance of applying various approaches and tools to conceptualizing and measuring it. They also emphasize the crucial role that institutions of collective action and property rights play in poverty reduction and sketch out theoretical nuances and methods of examining such institutions. In addition, power relations and political context are seen to be of outmost importance in poverty-related studies; the authors provide suggestions on how to understand and operationalize various dimensions of power and institutional environment in research. Outcomes are approached from the evaluative standpoint, which moves beyond straightforward empirical measurement of certain indicators to a comprehensive analysis that would involve a range of methods and approaches to both the definition and measurement of criteria that affect the complex reality of the poor." authors' abstractCollective action, Property rights, Poverty reduction, evaluation, Vulnerability, Power, Institutions, Wellbeing,

Property rights for poverty reduction:

Property rights, Poverty reduction, Hunger, Poverty dynamics, Food policy, food security, Pro-poor growth, Capacity building, Vulnerability, Gender, Multiple use, Devolution,

Collective Action and Property Rights for Poverty Reduction: A Review of Methods and Approaches

While much attention has been given to examining various aspects of poverty, a number of studies have shown that institutional environment in which the poor exist conditions welfare outcomes, thus highlighting the inherently crucial importance of institutions for poverty reduction. The institutions of property rights and collective action are among those identified as playing a major role in the livelihood strategies of the poor. This paper highlights ways to operationalize the conceptual framework developed by Di Gregorio and colleagues (2008), which provides an analytical tool to study poverty through the institutional lens with a special focus on collective action and property rights. By emphasizing the multidimensionality of poverty, the authors advocate the importance of applying various approaches and tools to conceptualizing and measuring it. They also emphasize the crucial role that institutions of collective action and property rights play in poverty reduction and sketch out theoretical nuances and methods of examining such institutions. In addition, power relations and political context are seen to be of outmost importance in poverty-related studies; the authors provide suggestions on how to understand and operationalize various dimensions of power and institutional environment in research. Outcomes are approached from the evaluative standpoint, which moves beyond straightforward empirical measurement of certain indicators to a comprehensive analysis that would involve a range of methods and approaches to both the definition and measurement of criteria that affect the complex reality of the poor

Collective Action for Smallholder Market Access: Evidence and Implications for Africa

It is widely acknowledged that the involvement of small farmers into markets can contribute to higher productivity and income growth, which in turn can enhance food security, poverty reduction efforts, and overall economic growth. In Africa, as in other parts of the developing world, agricultural production systems and their participants face significant challenges as a result of changing economic, environmental, and sociopolitical context. New dynamics in the global agricultural economy, such as the growth of supermarkets, are providing smallholders with both the new opportunities and new constraints to participate in and benefit from market exchanges. Collective action in the form of producer groups can enable African smallholders to take advantage of the new value chains and deal with existing market imperfections. However, certain conditions must be in place to create and sustain incentives for farmers to organize around marketing. Experiences from collective action in natural resource management (NRM) have shown that the types of markets and products, characteristics of user groups, institutional arrangements, and external environment need to be considered in order to determine the effectiveness and sustainability of collective marketing for smallholders. This paper applies the lessons from collective action in NRM to marketing, using existing case studies of producer groups in Africa, and offers policy recommendations on the factors that contribute to the success of collective marketing efforts. Copyright 2010 by The Policy Studies Organization.

The importance of property rights in climate change mitigation:

Even with abundant evidence of the urgent need for action on climate change mitigation, there are still those who consider mitigation strategies a burden. In the agricultural sector, climate change mitigation calls for changing some agricultural and resource management practices and technologies and often requires additional investment. However, there is an opportunity in agriculture for net benefit streams from a variety of zero- or low-cost mitigation opportunities ranging from agroforestry practices and restoration of degraded soils to zero-till and other land-management practices. Momentum has been generated to incorporate agriculture into carbon markets, potentially allowing smallholder farmers to access benefit streams from such transactions. However, who will receive the benefits from mitigation funds by, for example, increasing carbon stocks or reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land, will depend on the way different types of property rights are defined and dealt with in the upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. In many areas of the world, land tenure arrangements are complex. For example, in Africa, more than 90 percent of the land is formally claimed as state land, although millions of farming and pastoralist households use various customary and informal arrangements to access the land and other resources. Millions of hectares of forest and pastoral land in Asia and Latin America are similarly listed as state land, although used by communities, especially those of indigenous people or other marginalized ethnic groups. Often the same area may be under co-existing informal tenure systems, most of which are not recognized by formal land laws, but are instead accepted and enforced by the communities. Even where property rights are vested in a formal legal system with strong enforcement procedures, climate change mitigation measures raise new issues of who owns incremental carbon stocks and who should receive compensation for reductions in GHG emissions.Climate change,

Agriculture and climate change: The importance of property rights in climate change mitigation

Even with abundant evidence of the urgent need for action on climate change mitigation, there are still those who consider mitigation strategies a burden. In the agricultural sector, climate change mitigation calls for changing some agricultural and resource management practices and technologies and often requires additional investment. However, there is an opportunity in agriculture for net benefit streams from a variety of zero- or low-cost mitigation opportunities ranging from agroforestry practices and restoration of degraded soils to zero-till and other land-management practices. Momentum has been generated to incorporate agriculture into carbon markets, potentially allowing smallholder farmers to access benefit streams from such transactions. However, who will receive the benefits from mitigation funds by, for example, increasing carbon stocks or reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from land, will depend on the way different types of property rights are defined and dealt with in the upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. In many areas of the world, land tenure arrangements are complex. For example, in Africa, more than 90 percent of the land is formally claimed as state land, although millions of farming and pastoralist households use various customary and informal arrangements to access the land and other resources. Millions of hectares of forest and pastoral land in Asia and Latin America are similarly listed as state land, although used by communities, especially those of indigenous people or other marginalized ethnic groups. Often the same area may be under co-existing informal tenure systems, most of which are not recognized by formal land laws, but are instead accepted and enforced by the communities. Even where property rights are vested in a formal legal system with strong enforcement procedures, climate change mitigation measures raise new issues of who owns incremental carbon stocks and who should receive compensation for reductions in GHG emissions.PRIFPRI1; 2020DGO; EPT

Collective action for smallholder market access

PRIFPRI3; ISI; CAPRiEPT