Governance and sustainable devleopment

Abstract

To what extent community inclusion in protected areas’ governance affect biodiversity outcomes is the main question that we attempt to answer in chapter 1 using the extra-ordinary datasets of the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPAs) and the Redlist of International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). We exploit variation in cumulative size of designated protected areas differentiated by IUCN governance types and estimate the threat to mammals and birds in Sub-Saharan African countries. We find stronger effect of community inclusion in protected areas’ decision making on the reduction of threat to mammals while no significant effect on the threat level to birds. Our findings provide evidence in support of positive response of community participation towards common goods that carry potential economic incentives. This chapter contributes to the idea of inclusive environmental policies that yield environmental gains not at the cost of social exclusion.

We frame the governance structure of community-based trophy hunting(CBTH) programs as a form of collaborative governance that involve multiple stakeholders in the management of common pool resources. By conducting a mataanalysis on 80 published case studies, we develop contingency propositions that help practitioners and governments to understand and implement programs that seek environmental conservation in collaboration with local communities. We identify factors that may interplay to affect the incentive to participate in community based conservation programs particularly CBTH. We also argue that, despite the uncertainty of effectiveness of community-based conservation from the beginning, due to the pre-history of conflicts, governments tend to rely upon bottom-up approach that utilize the effort of local communities in conserving wildlife rather than ineffective command-and-control policies. On the other hand, local communities cooperate and participate in CBTH due to power-imbalance between strong governments and weak communities who live closely with wildlife. We finally elaborate the process of CBTH and identify factors that determine the outcomes of CBTH programs in developing countries.

We examine the effect of a large scale innovative smart-phone-aided monitoring program implemented in over 28000 government schools for improving teacher’s attendance and school performance in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, Pakistan. We find ideal conditions for a natural experiment by utilizing nationally representative survey that enables us to create treatment and control areas. Our findings suggest that the program has improved teacher’s attendance by nearly 8% in the year immediately following the program. However, this effect decreases by nearly half after two years of the program introduction. We also find the program’s direct effect on the enrolled children’s test performance at home. Enrolled children’s standardized Reading, Math and English ability in monitored schools has improved significantly by 0.07, 0.13 and 0.11 standard deviation points respectively at the lower (0-5) grades. There is slight improvement in the standardized test performance of higher grade children. The program also increases the probability of children enrollment into government schools. Our results are robust on different specifications and sub-samples of schools and districts clusters.