Tenure security, resource poverty, public programs, and household plot‐level conservation investments in the highlands of northern Ethiopia

Abstract

Land degradation poses a serious problem for the livelihoods of rural producers. Furthermore, there is rarely enough private investment taking place to commensurate the scale of the problem. This article examines the role of tenure insecurity, resource poverty, risk and time preferences, and community-led land conservation on differentiated patterns of household investment in land conservation in northern Ethiopia. We control for biophysical, household characteristics, market access conditions, and village level factors. Investments in soil bunds and stone terraces are specifically studied so as to capture the link between these various factors and the durability of conservation investments. We introduce the distinction between the determinants of the decision to invest and how much to invest in conservation. Regression results show that publicly led conservation programs seem to significantly stimulate private investment. A host of plot-level variables and household perceptions of returns on conservation investments, expressed in terms of perceived improvements in land quality and increased crop yields, were found to be critical to the decision to invest and intensify soil conservation. The evidence on the significance of households' attitudes toward risk aversion suggests the important role of risk and the household's risk-bearing capacity in the decision to intensify conservation measures. At the same time, tenure security indicators and households' resource endowments (resource poverty) had weaker effects in increasing willingness to invest and the level of investment made. The policy implications of these results point to the importance of agricultural research and extension efforts that target technologies which reduce household risk and poverty while enabling sustainable investments in conservation measures by individual households. Copyright 2006 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions?

“…To believe that the entire result is spurious, however, would require that the entire correlation is due to reverse causation. This would contradict studies that have found the relationship between land tenure and soil conservation investments in Africa to be surprisingly weak -see for example Besley (1995) or Hagos and Holden (2006). Sensitivity of the slavery result to the exclusion of North Africa or addition of the Nile is more problematic.…”

Improved water and land management in the Ethiopian highlands: its impact on downstream stakeholders dependent on the Blue Nile. Intermediate Results Dissemination Workshop held at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 5-6 February 2009

“…Many of these factors are affected by government policies on infrastructure and market development, input and credit supplies, land tenure, agricultural research and extension, conservation programs, land use regulation, local governance and collective action, and non-governmental programs Desta et al, 2000). And a lot has been done in terms of understanding the specific roles of the set of factors in different contexts in Ethiopia and elsewhere (Gebremedhin and Swinton, 2003;Hagos and Holden, 2006; for a review see Yesuf and Pender, 2005). However, there is a little attempt to understand the broad macro, institutional and organizational issues that influence land and water management decisions, which is the focus of this paper.…”

Determinants of farmers' tree-planting investment decisions as a degraded landscape management strategy in the central highlands of Ethiopia

“…Success to date in terms of widely adopted and sustained realizations of tree-planting investment decisions for the intention of land management strategy has been very limited in the Ethiopian highlands (Admassie, 2000;Rahmato, 2001;Bewket, 2007). Increasingly, focused studies were carried out in Ethiopia to examine the major challenges for the adoption and sustained use of land-management strategies, such as stone terraces and soil bund technologies (Shiferaw and Holden, 1998;Bewket and Sterk, 2002;Bekele and Drake, 2003;Gebremedhin and Swinton, 2003;Hagos and Holden, 2006;Bewket, 2007;Amsalu and De Graaff, 2007) as well as cattle manure (Belay and Bewket, 2013). However, detailed research findings are too scarce to emphasize the determinants of farm-level tree-planting decisions as a land management strategy.…”

“…Although a range of explanatory variables were identified and considered in various land-management literature and the use of these variables frequently lacks consistency (Shiferaw and Holden, 1998;Gebremedhin and Swinton, 2003;Bekele and Drake, 2003;Hagos and Holden, 2006;Amsalu and De Graaff, 2007;Mekonnen and Damte, 2011;Mekonnen et al, 2012;Belay and Bewket, 2013;Teshome et al, 2014), the predictor variables of this study were identified based on the consultation with natural-resource conservation experts, background information of the farming systems of the study area and literature of land-resource management. Before running the model, preliminary analyses were carried out to check the presence of multicollinearity among predictor variables and the computed tolerance values of collinearity diagnostics analysis is greater than 0.1.…”