An official website of the United States government
Rural out-migration was a rare socio-economic phenomenon when community forestry began in the 1980s in Nepal. Now, out-migration significantly influences nearly every aspect of rural livelihoods in the country. However, it is unclear how out-migration affects community forestry governance, which is essential for sustainable rural development. Therefore, this paper addresses the following research question: Does rural out-migration affect forest users’ participation in community forestry decision-making and management practices? This paper draws on data collected from an extensive survey of 415 households from 15 community forest user groups in 2 Mid-Hill districts of Nepal. The research used ordered-logit regression to model the impacts of out-migration on participation in forest management and decision-making, while controlling for a number of other socio-economic factors. The model results show that total household size and number of internal migrants, together with multiple resource characteristics and institutional attributes, were major factors affecting participation in decision-making and forest management. However, the number of international migrants did not have a significant role in determining the levels of the participation. This study provides valuable insights for future community forestry policymaking that aims to address the effects of out-migration on community forest management in Nepal.
more »
« less
Remittance income weakens participation in community-based natural resource management
While many Global South contexts rely on community-based natural resource management, out-migration has the potential to change rural peoples’ incentives to participate in such management. We argue that remittance income from out-migration reduces dependence on natural resource commons, which may in turn weaken the voluntary participation upon which community-based natural resource management initiatives depend. We studied this relationship empirically in Nepal, a country with a largely community-based model for the governance of its forests. In analyzing nationwide survey data that spanned nearly one decade, we fit a household-level fixed-effects regression model, which showed that households that received more remittance income were less likely to rely on commonly held forests compared to households in the same village that received less remittance income. Using a similar estimation approach and more detailed survey data from the districts of Mustang and Gorkha, we also showed that larger remittance incomes predicted less participation in forest governance and management activities. These results suggest that the remittances associated with out-migration from rural areas can weaken incentives for local participation in natural resource management among the people left behind. If remittance income has these effects, policymakers may need to reconsider how to sustain community-based resource management in countries or regions that are experiencing widespread rural out-migration. Future research is needed to establish causality, validate the results cross-nationally, and explore new policy innovations that could support resource governance in contexts where many resource users receive remittances.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10684836
- Publisher / Repository:
- Resilience Alliance
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecology and Society
- Volume:
- 30
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1708-3087
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Nepal’s community forestry program is widely regarded as successful. At its peak, the program enlisted a large share of the rural population as managers of the country’s communal forests. However, recent empirical evidence suggests that voluntary participation in the program is in decline. Analyzing the empirical literature, we describe this surprising pattern of decline and discuss potential negative impacts. We also use political-economic reasoning and extant evidence to theorize about the drivers of this decline, arguing that livelihood diversification and profitable out-migration have altered the forest–people relationship in many villages, weakening incentives for participation in community forestry. Finally, we assess the viability of several institutional options for either replacing the program with other management approaches or reforming it to boost incentives for participation in light of the noted socioeconomic changes in rural Nepal. We argue that well-designed payment schemes or reforms that enable local people to commercialize community forests could both support participation by enhancing the associated benefits, and institutional changes related to local meetings and labor requirements could do so by reducing the associated costs. The replacement of community-based approaches with top-down management or privatization, however, appears risky due to a potential lack of government capacity and the possibility that such institutional changes could damage livelihoods or create negative externalities for some households. The consolidation of community forests also presents governance and management challenges. Our analysis suggests the need for greater scholarly attention to how environmental policy tools withstand social and economic change and to environmental policy succession—or how environmental policies are reimagined when they are no longer an appropriate fit for the local context.more » « less
-
Abstract What is the effect of migration on fuel use in rural Zambia? Opportunities to increase income can be scarce in this setting; in response, households may pursue a migration strategy to increase resources as well as to mitigate risk. Migrant remittances may make it possible for households to shift from primary reliance on firewood to charcoal, and the loss of productive labor through migration may reinforce this shift. This paper uses four waves of panel data collected as part of the Child Grant Programme in rural Zambia to examine the connection between migration and the choice of firewood or charcoal as cooking fuel and finds evidence for both mechanisms. Importantly, this paper considers migration as a process, including out as well as return migration, embedding it in the context of household dynamics generally. Empirical results suggest that while out-migration helps move households away from firewood as a fuel source, return migration moves them back, but because the former is more common, the overall effect of migration is to shift households away from primary reliance on firewood.more » « less
-
Nepal’s forest cover nearly doubled over the last three decades. While Community Forest (CF) management and agricultural abandonment are primary drivers of forest cover expansion, the contribution of afforestation on privately managed land is not well documented. We mapped forest cover change from 1988 through 2016 in 40 privately managed sites that transitioned from agriculture to forest and assessed how agricultural abandonment influenced private land management and afforestation. We used a mixed method analysis to integrate our 29- year Landsat satellite image-based record of annual forest cover with interview data on historical land cover and land use dynamics from 65 land managers in Bagmati Province. We find that privately managed land accounted for 37% of local forest cover gain, with mean forest area within private forests growing from 9% to 59%. Land managers identified two factors driving these gains on private land: implementation of CF man- agement in adjacent government forests and out-migration. These previously undocumented linkages between forest cover gain on private land and CF management merits further research in community forests and calls for greater policy and technical support for small-scale timber growers and rural households who rely on private forests for income generation.more » « less
-
Abbass, Kashif (Ed.)Forests play a key role in the mitigation of global warming and provide many other vital ecosystem goods and services. However, as forest continues to vanish at an alarming rate from the surface of the planet, the world desperately needs knowledge on what contributes to forest preservation and restoration. Migration, a hallmark of globalization, is widely recognized as a main driver of forest recovery and poverty alleviation. Here, we show that remittance from migrants reinforces forest recovery that would otherwise be unlikely with mere migration, realizing the additionality of payments for ecosystem services for China’s largest reforestation policy, the Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP). Guided by the framework that integrates telecoupling and coupled natural and human systems, we investigate forest-livelihood dynamics under the CCFP through the lens of rural out-migration and remittance using both satellite remote sensing imagery and household survey data in two representative sites of rural China. Results show that payments from the CCFP significantly increases the probability of sending remittance by out-migrants to their origin households. We observe substantial forest regeneration and greening surrounding households receiving remittance but forest decline and browning in proximity to households with migrants but not receiving remittance, as measured by forest coverage and the Enhanced Vegetation Index derived from space-borne remotely sensed data. The primary mechanism is that remittance reduces the reliance of households on natural capital from forests, particularly fuelwood, allowing forests near the households to recover. The shares of the estimated ecological and economic additionality induced by remittance are 2.0% (1.4%∼3.8%) and 9.7% (5.0%∼15.2%), respectively, to the baseline of the reforested areas enrolled in CCFP and the payments received by the participating households. Remittance-facilitated forest regeneration amounts to 12.7% (6.0%∼18.0%) of the total new forest gained during the 2003–2013 in China. Our results demonstrate that remittance constitutes a telecoupling mechanism between rural areas and cities over long distances, influencing the local social-ecological gains that the forest policy intended to stimulate. Thus, supporting remittance-sending migrants in cities can be an effective global warming mitigation strategy.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-16436-300334
