In the decentralization of forest management, the state devolves forestland use right to communities. What if the state devolves the right directly to individual households, not to communities? Does this policy work and within this policy what devolution mechanism works better in terms of forest conservation? This paper addresses these questions using the context of mangrove forest in Viet Nam. Mangrove forest areas in Viet Nam have experienced a substantial decline during the last century.

Abstract

Abstract

Droughts and floods are some of the major climatic hazards in the semi-arid areas of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Climate change affects the periodicity and severity of such hazards, and eventually the well-being of many rural communities in the region, including semi-arid Ghana. Enhancing the resilience of local communities to droughts and floods would be a necessary step to meet different national development priorities. The aim of this chapter is to assess the perceived community resilience to recurrent floods and droughts induced by climate change.

We investigate the effect of the informal sector and a range of governance indicators on both global and local pollutants for a panel of 58 countries during 1996–2011. The analysis employs a fixed effects-instrumental variable generalized method of moments approach. We find that the size of the informal sector has a significant impact on environmental quality, which is conditional on the level of economic development.

Urban sprawl has gained popularity in academic discourse in recent times, but the majority of the research was conducted in developed countries. There is a marginal body of works on the character and nature of urban sprawl in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), although the region isexperiencing one of the fastest rates of sprawl. Urbanisation in SSA is very rapid, and in addition to the emerging challenges of globalisation, climate change and poverty, SSA cities have an enormous task to manage urban sprawl.