Forest tenure reforms are occurring in many developing countries around the world. These reforms typically include devolution of forest lands to local people and communities, which has attracted a great deal of attention and interest. While the nature and level of devolution vary by country, all have potentially important implications for resource allocation, local ecosystem services, livelihoods and climate change. 

In low-income countries, both nearby local villagers, “insiders”, and non-locals, “outsiders”, extract products from protected forests even though their actions are illegal.

Land use is regulated through various mixes of command-and-control interventions that directly affect land use via land use restrictions, and other public interventions that indirectly affect land use via agricultural, forestry, trade or macro-economic policies.

More recently, coalitions of public and private actors have designed market-based and/or demand-led policy instruments to influence land use—e.g., eco-certification, geographical indications, commodity roundtables, moratoria, and payments for environmental services.

This article reviews the history of the Environment for Development (EfD) initiative, its activities in capacity building and policy-oriented research, and case studies at its centres in Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania.

Previous studies on improved cook stove adoption in developing countries use cross-sectional data, which make it difficult to control for unobserved heterogeneity and investigate what happens to adoption over time. We use robust non-linear panel data and hazard models on three rounds of panel data from urban Ethiopia to investigate the determinants of adoption and disadoption of electric cook stoves over time.

We use inverse probability weighting to examine the effects of a unique two-pronged common-property forestry program in the Gimbo district of Ethiopia, which includes Joint Forestry Management and improved non-timber forest product marketing efforts. The program was found to have affected household access to agricultural land, and, thus, reduced livestock holdings, due to program strictures. Furthermore, despite those reductions, there is evidence that the program had economically significant effects on other activities.

That wealthier developing country households may rely more heavily on child labor than poorer households has come to be known as the “wealth paradox.” This paper tests for a wealth paradox with regard to common natural resource wealth by analyzing the relationship between child labor and improved common property forest management (CPFM) in Bolivia.

Protected areas are a cornerstone of forest conservation in developing countries. Yet we know little about their effects on forest cover change or the socioeconomic status of local communities, and even less about the relationship between these effects. This paper assesses whether “win-win” scenarios are possible—that is, whether protected areas can both stem forest cover change and alleviate poverty. We examine protected areas in the Peruvian Amazon using high-resolution satellite images and household-level survey data for the early 2000s.