This is a PhD dissertation by Haileselassie Medhin and containing seven self-contained papers:

We use three rounds of a rich panel data set to investigate the determinants of household fuel choice and energy transition in urban Ethiopia. We observe that energy transition did not occur following economic growth in Ethiopia during the past decade.

The adoption and diffusion of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) has become an important issue in the development-policy agenda for sub-Saharan Africa, especially as a way to tackle land degradation, low agricultural productivity and poverty. However, the adoption rates of SAPs remain below expected levels.

The type and combination of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) adopted have a significant effect on agricultural productivity and food security. This study develops a multinomial endogenous switching regression model of farmers' choice of combination of SAPs and impacts on maize income and agrochemicals and family labor use in rural Ethiopia.

As a result of many years of deforestation, fuelwood scarcity is a critical problem in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government encouraged afforestation and tree growing at both the community and household levels as a policy to stem deforestation and degradation of agricultural lands. The rationale underlying the tree growing strategy is that some significant part of whatever is planted will be used as fuelwood, thereby reducing the demand for wood from native forestlands and use of crop residues and animal dung needed for soil improvement.

The adoption of certain farm management practices, such as tree planting and soil and water conservation, can reduce exposure to weather shocks. However, in many countries the adoption of such risk mitigating measures is far from complete.

Previous studies on improved cookstove adoption in developing countries use cross-sectional data, which makes it difficult to control for unobserved heterogeneity and investigate what happens to adoption over time.

Land conflicts can be detrimental. An important goal of development policy is to help define and instill respect for borders. This is often implemented through mandatory and expensive interventions that rely on the expansion of government land administration institutions.

In response to global opportunities and domestic challenges, Ethiopia is revising its energy policy to switch from high-cost imported fossil fuel to domestically produced biofuels. Currently, there are biofuel investment activities in different parts of the country to produce ethanol and biodiesel. However, there is no rigorous empirical study to assess impacts of such investments.

So far Africa has benefited little from climate finance as compared to other continents with emerging economies. Climate projects are distributed unevenly across regions as well as among developing countries. This is partly due to lack of trained manpower in some of these countries and too restrictive criteria of most of the climate fund projects and programs that are designed to the disadvantage of Africa.