We analyze roles of tenure insecurity and household endowments in explaining tree growing in Ethiopia, where farmers cannot sell or mortgage land and factor markets are imperfect.

This study will review the past studies of the cost of land degradation in Ethiopia, assess the major methodological and conceptual issues and problems existing in the different approaches, compare the findings across these studies considering the relative merits of the different approaches, and draw implications for policies and programs, as well as for future research related to land management in Ethiopia.

This is an empirical exploration of villagers’ dependence on non-timber forest products in the Morogoro region in Tanzania, the decision rules used concerning where and how much they collect, how collection changes with forest degradation, and the implications of more restrictive access from participatory forest management. Villagers’ responses to increased degradation vary by forest product; some collection tends to be displaced to other forests, less of the resources are collected, and collection times increase considerably.

This paper relates principle findings in the optimal economic enforcement literature to practical issues of enforcing and managing forest and wildlife access restrictions in developing countries.

The authors identified large gaps in the theoretical literature that limit its usefulness for practical management, particularly regarding limited funding and cost recovery, multiple layers of enforcement, different incentives faced by enforcers, and conflict between protected-area managers’ job requirements and rural people’s needs.

The authors explore the impact of participatory forest management (PFM) in Tanzania that excludes villagers from traditional access to forests to collect non-timber forest products (NTFPs).

Using fieldwork and a spatial-temporal model, they focused on forest degradation and regeneration and villagers’ utility before and after PFM has been introduced. Although the PFM forest improves, they found that a moratorium on NTFP collection often adversely affects villagers’ livelihoods and more distant, less-protected forests.

With decentralization experiments occurring in the Chinese forestry sector, the authors used a survey-based choice experiment to investigate farmers’ preferences for various property-rights attributes of a forestland contract.

This paper analyzes the correlates of aggregated and disaggregated indices of common property forest management (CPFM) and the relationship between CPFM and the decision to grow trees and the number of trees grown in the Amhara region of Ethiopia.

Little is known about land cover change in mixed agroforestry systems, which often supply valuable ecological services. The authors use a spatial regression model to analyze clearing in El Salvador’s shade coffee–growing regions during the 1990s.

The authors estimated the deforestation impact of Costa Rica’s pioneering environmental services payments program (Pagos por Servicios Ambientales, or PSA) between 2000 and 2005. Despite finding that less than 1 in 100 of enrolled land parcels would have been deforested annually without payments, the program’s potential for impact was increased by explicitly targeting areas with deforestation pressure and increasing some payments to enroll land that would have been cleared.