No abstract

This paper considers the case of Bangkok where, as in many Asian cities, the expansion of urban areas has outpaced the ability of public entities to manage and provide basic services. One potential way to improve the capacity of neighborhoods to assist in provision or improvement in environmental services is to enhance the positive contributions provided by local social networks and social capital. A conceptual framework is presented to explore the role of social networks in environmental management in polluted urban environments. This is followed by a brief description of the methodology and survey instrument used to collect information from a sample of community households in Bangkok and an analysis of the results from this survey regarding environmental practices, community action, and social networks. Some of the results suggest that increasing the number of social interactions that residents of a community experience is associated with increased community participation as, apparently, is increasing knowledge about what happens to waste or waste water after it leaves the community. Local public education efforts that focus on useful knowledge about environmental impacts may well be an effective way to encourage community participation. Copyright 2002 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) is widely employed in various settings; however, whether, and in what contexts, PES programs achieve their objectives by improving local livelihoods and conservation goals is still being debated. This paper aims to evaluate the impacts of payments for forest environmental services (PFES) policies on livelihoods and the environment using propensity score matching of data on 725 systematic randomly selected households in the buffer zones of seven protected areas (PAs) of Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue provinces in Central Vietnam and data from the General Statistics Office and Landsat. The findings indicate that the PFES policy has some positive effects on economic and environmental issues for different groups. In terms of financial capital, the study found that poor households with PFES have slightly higher income than what they would have had they not participated in PFES. The difference in total income between poor households with and without PFES, however, was statistically insignificant, while the income of non-poor households with PFES was significantly higher than those without PFES. In addition, PFES households are likely to have more consumption expenditure for their daily living and better access to loans from various microfinance sources compared to those without PFES. The PFES policy has provided slight changes in the forest and forest cover and reduced natural forest loss between the pre-PFES and PFES periods. The findings of this study contribute to designing future PFES policies that can better distribute benefits to all household groups as well as harmonize social and natural capital.

No abstract

No abstract