RAPID: Global Dependence of Livelihoods on Forests and the Impacts of Forest Investments

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary This research addresses the important question of whether sustainable development interventions yield long lasting benefits in the context of the Multi-Stakeholder Forestry Programme, a multi-donor funded sustainable development initiative implemented in 21 districts in Nepal since 2012. The PIs will leverage data already collected on 4200 households in the MSFP-project area immediately before the 2015 earthquake in Nepal by revisiting the same households for post-disaster data collection to assess the impact of the intervention on the earthquake recovery efforts of households and communities. With this research, the PIs are able to answer questions about the vulnerability of different groups of households to earthquake and other disaster impacts, the key socio-economic and institutional characteristics that structured the effects of the earthquake, and whether individual or collective benefits from the sustainable development initiative better supported earthquake recovery efforts. By identifying the types of project-related benefits with stronger positive effects on household and community level coping capacity, the research will show how international development projects can enhance household and community resilience and support local efforts to cope with disasters more effectively. Data collection for the research will be carried out with the support of in-country partners. The research will also generate a panel dataset with two waves of data collected prior to the earthquake and a new wave of data collected after the earthquake. Technical Summary The research will generate a panel dataset with two waves of data collected prior to the earthquake and a new wave of data collected after the earthquake. The panel dataset will help address enduring questions of interest to political scientists, social scientists more generally, and interdisciplinary scholars interested in sustainable development, disaster recovery, governance, and impact evaluation. The question of whether individual or collective level efforts and support are more effective in enhancing incomes and welfare, coping with variable levels of unanticipated income and asset shocks, and the conditions under which individual or collective efforts are complementary or in competition addresses the very roots of the social-scientific enterprise. By casting the relationships between external interventions and local socio-economic changes in terms of individual vs. community level support and efforts, this research opens the doors to insights from disparate theoretical frameworks used in writings on sustainable development (e.g., around different forms of capitals, entitlements, and livelihoods), disaster recovery (e.g., around vulnerability, adaptive capacity, and resilience), and governance (e.g., around rules, expectations, and institutional analysis). This research will contribute to a new framework focusing on how public capacity-building interventions can be analyzed in terms of the effectiveness of individual vs. collective efforts and contributions in enabling recovery from natural disasters.