No abstract

Numerous studies have sought to empirically test the effectiveness of foreign aid as a tool for international development, with often inconsistent or contradictory results. New sources of disaggregated aid data now allow researchers to test the impact of individual sectors of aid on sector-specific outcomes. The paper investigates the effectiveness of foreign aid in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) sector and seeks to identify constraints on WaSH aid effectiveness in recipient countries. Multilevel latent growth, dynamic panel, and instrumental variable regression models were estimated on a panel dataset comprising 125 recipient countries over 20 years. WaSH aid was consistently associated with improved health outcomes in middle-income countries; no effect on those outcomes was observed in low-income countries. Potential constraints on the effectiveness of WaSH aid – including political, economic, institutional, and technical constraints – were examined using subgroup analysis. The effectiveness of WaSH aid was found to have been constrained by government ineffectiveness and regulatory quality in recipient countries. Countries with large rural populations also appear to have benefitted less from WaSH aid than more urbanized recipient countries.

No abstract

No abstract

The emergence and diffusion of community-based forest management (CBFM) in India over the past several decades has been of interest to scholars and natural resource managers alike. The prevailing view in the existing academic literature presupposes that CBFM arose spontaneously in individual villages, evolving into a grassroots movement that spread across districts and states. Previous studies of the phenomenon have focused on the micro-level (individual or community) and macro-level (national or global) factors that gave rise to CBFM; the role of meso-level (organizational) conditions in facilitating the rise and spread of CBFM has garnered significantly less attention. This study presents the results of structured interviews with key informants in 345 villages throughout the district of Boudh in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Results suggest that meso-level conditions were vitally important in the development of CBFM. Nongovernmental organizations and the Indian Forest Department promoted CBFM and facilitated networking and sharing across villages, while informal networks between the villages expedited the diffusion of the new management model. The study also discusses the interaction between various meso, micro, and macro level facilitating conditions and concludes that the dynamics of CBFM in Odisha and in India more generally are significantly more complex than has previously been supposed.