Socioeconomic Impacts of Public Forest Policies on Heterogeneous Agricultural Households

Abstract

Nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme. In principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation. However, concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation, and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural Nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods. To study the effect of government policies on forest use, an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in Nepal was developed. The model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources, and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests. Socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income, employment and income inequality. The results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact, and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies. This study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment, and widen income inequalities within communities, compared to alternative policies. Certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households' ability to meet survival needs. The findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry's contribution to production are accounted for. The study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural Nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs.

Integrated Analysis of Forest Policies and Their Impacts on Landscape and Lifescape Dynamics: A Case Study in The Walanae Forest Management Unit, Indonesia

“…In this research, we analyzed four parameters of lifescape, that is, livelihood/occupation, agricultural crop/forestry production, land tenure, and income (using gross regional domestic product approach). These parameters have been selected on the basis of a review of previous studies related to socioeconomic characteristics (lifescape) (Amoroso et al, 2004;Fitzsimons & Cherry, 2008;Dhakal et al, 2012;Mutoko et al, 2014;Abdullah et al, 2016;Shuyu et al, 2017).…”

“…The lifescape characteristics were derived from primary and secondary data. The focus is to utilize the sources of secondary data and gain support from primary data (Dhakal et al, 2012). KPH Walanae has adequately large areas.…”

“…Forest policies have become a major cause in land use and land cover change (LULCC) (Geist & Lambin, 2002;Hersperger & Bürgi, 2010;Chavez, 2014;Günter et al, 2015;Garcia & Ballester, 2016) and community lifescape change (Dhakal et al, 2012;Loxton et al, 2014;Yusran et al, 2017). This condition is due to forest policies play important roles in guiding activities implemented in forest management (Geist et al, 2006;Yasmi et al, 2010;OECD, 2010;Grebner et al, 2013) and impact the local environment and community welfare (Gibbes et al, 2017).…”

The dilemma of NGOs and participatory conservation

“…For instance, local users of a forest may favor resource extraction to satisfy their livelihood needs, whereas the international stakeholders may push for forest conservation for carbon storage (Dolsak & Ostrom, 2003). Given their poverty, indigenous groups in developing countries feel crucially in need of rapid economic improvements of their conditions from conservation and tourism activities (Dhakal, Bigsby, & Cullen, 2012). On the other hand, conservation-oriented NGOs are primarily interested in diminishing the level of resource extraction within the conservation zone, giving less weight to the economic considerations of the local community (Coria & Calfucura, 2012;Reid et al, 2016).…”

Environmental policies and socio-territorial impact in lacandon jungle 2002-2012

“…Also, when there is a regional/national landscape change, it is possible to discover general patternsalthough not homogeneous -in local specific changes. This spatial analysis facilitates a discussion on the new alternatives for favourable policies in regions involved in a critical process of change [7].…”