| 1. |
- Amuakwa-Mensah, Salome, et al.
(författare)
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Association between rural electrification and agricultural output: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
- 2022
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier. - 2452-2929 .- 2468-0532. ; 25
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores the association between rural electrification and agricultural output at the macro level using panel data on 43 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1990 to 2016. We employed Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) with time trend and country fixed effect in our econometrics estimation to address the potential serial correlation. Our study investigates the following; i) the association between rural electrification and agricultural output, measured as agricultural output per GDP and agricultural output per worker, ii) whether the relationship between rural electrification and agricultural output is conditional on institutional quality of a country, and iii) whether electrification enhances the marginal effect of factor inputs. We find a positive significant association between rural electrification and agricultural output. Also, our result shows that the relationship between electrification and agricultural output is conditional on the quality of institution and factor inputs of a country. With the exception of capital, the association between the interaction term of rural electrification and factor inputs (labour and land), and agricultural output is negative. However, we find a higher positive direct relationship between labour and agricultural output per GDP, implying a higher productivity for those labour who remain in the sector. Our results are heterogenous across population size quartiles sub-samples.
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| 2. |
- Arora Jonsson, Seema
(författare)
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Blind spots in environmental policy-making: How beliefs about science and development may jeopardize environmental solutions
- 2017
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier BV. - 2468-0532 .- 2452-2929. ; 5, s. 27-29
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Engaging with knowledges outside of western science and questions of power is increasingly being acknowledged as an imperative for helping solve intractable environmental problems. What is unacknowledged is the difference in how this is reasoning is applied in relation to policy-making in the global North and South. While questions of power such as gender and people’s participation are integral to international policy-making in the Northern development policies for the South, there is often little on these perspectives in domestic environmental policy-making. Underlying this paradox are assumptions about science and development in policy-making that preclude a discussion of environmental alternatives. These assumptions generate blind spots in environmental policy-making that need to be addressed so that environmental policy in the global North too is able to respond to environmental problems on the basis of evidence and rather than assumptions about science and about the rest of the world.
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| 3. |
- Hajdu, Flora, et al.
(författare)
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Cash transfers for sustainable rural livelihoods? Examining the long-term productive effects of the Child Support Grant in South Africa
- 2020
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier BV. - 2452-2929 .- 2468-0532. ; 19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cash transfers have received increased scholarly and policy attention, as a means of reducing poverty in the global South. While cash transfers are primarily intended to prevent impoverishment and deprivation, several studies suggest they can have 'productive' impacts, contributing to building sustainable livelihoods. However, pilot projects of unconditional cash transfers have often been too brief or too recent to determine how small, but regular, transfers can improve rural livelihoods over time. This paper explores potential long-term productive effects of cash transfers on rural household's livelihoods. This is done through revisiting, after 14 years, all (273) households in two South African villages included in an extensive livelihood and asset survey in 2002. That survey predated the phasing in of the Child Support Grant (CSG), targeted at impoverished children. When re-surveyed in 2016, some households had cumulatively received significant, while others little or no CSG income. Multivariate regression analysis shows how households that received more CGS income were more likely to invest in productive assets (e.g. small ploughs), and engage in poultry, staple crop and vegetable production. We also found a statistically significant correlation between CSG incomes and growing a larger variety of crops, in an environment generally marked by deagrarianization. However, correlations between receiving more CSG and employment or engagement in informal small-scale trade were not significant. We use data from interviews and observations to explain these processes further. Compared with the paucity of outcomes from other concurrent and costly development interventions in the focal villages, cash transfers have improved livelihoods and living conditions significantly. However, the structural and contextual factors that cause and reproduce poverty remain unaltered, limiting the effects of comparatively small cash transfers. While we show that the cash transfers generate productive livelihood-enhancing effects, they remain insufficient to lift most households out of poverty without further structural changes and developmental interventions. © 2020 The Authors
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| 4. |
- Knutsson, Per, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Perspectives on enclosures in pastoralist drylands: From contradictory evidence to the formulation of innovative land management strategies
- 2021
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier BV. - 2452-2929 .- 2468-0532. ; 23
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Drylands in Sub-Saharan Africa are subject to rapid and enduring population increase, agricultural expansion, land large-scale infrastructure developments, as well as climate change, affecting some 265 million pastoralists and agro-pastoralists. These changes are promoting a transition from traditional pastoralist ways of life characterized by seasonal mobility, towards more sedentary livelihoods based on more intensive and commercial uses of land-based resources. As part of of this ongoing transition, establishment of enclosures on pastoralist commons is emerging as a default, but highly contested, development pathway. Based on a review of the current enclosure debate across the natural, economic, and social sciences, with a geographical focus on the East African drylands, we discuss the potential and limitations of enclosures as land management tool, and propose a conceptual framework for how enclosures can act as an integral part of sustainable pastoralist land use. Such a framework constitute an important piece of the puzzle for more productively linking the urgent need of innovative ways of managing pastoralist rangelands, to the present international and national commitments to restoration of degraded lands.
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| 5. |
- Alobo Loison, Sarah, et al.
(författare)
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Regional evidence of smallholder-based growth in Zambia's livestock sector
- 2020
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier BV. - 2452-2929. ; 19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Growth in the smallholder-based livestock sector, characterized by increasing number of animals, commercialization and processing of animal products have historically provided a decisive contribution to raising the incomes of farm households, and to the broader process of agricultural transformation. In this paper, we use a mixed methods approach to examine the processes of extensive and intensive supply-side growth in the livestock sector in Zambia, specifically in Mazabuka and Mkushi regions. The quantitative data is a three-year panel of 277 smallholders collected between 2002 and 2013. This is complimented with qualitative data from interviews conducted with farmers, key informants and focus groups in 2012 and 2016. We ask: To what extent can we capture evidence of smallholder-based supply-side growth in the livestock sector in our Zambia data? Are growth processes corresponding with extensive (increasing numbers of animals) or intensive (investments for improving productivity) trajectories? What characterizes smallholders taking part in the growth process? Our results show evidence of growth in the livestock sector. While it is overall based on extensification, there are initial stages of intensification in the south. The smallholders driving the process are mainly emergent farmers with land holdings between 2 and 20 hectares. The process seems to be male-dominated, with male farm managers benefitting to a higher degree than their female counterparts, irrespective of the region. Based on our findings, we provide policy recommendations relevant specifically for Zambia's agricultural development and generally for the role of the livestock sector in the agricultural growth process in the Global South generally.
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| 6. |
- Arora Jonsson, Seema
(författare)
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Changing business as usual in global climate and development action: Making space for social justice in carbon markets
- 2023
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier BV. - 2452-2929. ; 29
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Carbon markets are being promoted both by business and governments as a predominant way to address climate change. Critical scholarship on climate change has brought attention to their disappointing climate performance, for the social and geopolitical inequalities they engender and for distracting from the imperative of changing current extractivist modes of capitalist production and consumption. Yet, given that private interests are considered central in climate action today and that carbon markets are dominant, we argue that it makes it important for us as practitioners and academics to engage with them, while maintaining our own critical posi-tion. The central aim in this article is to grapple with the human dimensions of global environmental governance, to explore practical ways in which we may go about ensuring justice and sustainability in everyday development and climate action, beyond theoretical denunciations of the system and structures in which we find ourselves. Drawing on scholarship that questions the hegemonic power of capitalism, we adopt a practical stance to reflect on how a gendered methodology, the W+ standard, modelled on methods used to measure carbon emissions reductions, may be used in development and in combination with carbon standards if needed, in a way that emissions-reducing projects also lead to gender and social justice. The W+ Standard is a methodology that en-sures that gendered inequalities, including women's often invisible care work, are accounted for, by quantifying and certifying benefits for women involved in community development and climate projects. Based on an activist academic and practitioner conversation, we explore if engaging in the politics of the present (in this case, with private interests and carbon markets) may make space for the political agency of women and men and diverse economic and social contexts in such projects and enable a shift in business in usual. We argue that there is a need to engage in new experimental economic relations in local contexts that may have the potential to change unequal development and environmental (climate) relationships, in encounters between global development and local lives.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Klege, Rebecca A., et al.
(författare)
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Tenancy and energy choices in Rwanda. A replication and extension study
- 2022
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Ingår i: World Development Perspectives. - : Elsevier. - 2452-2929. ; 26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper replicates and extends the study by Martey (2019) by investigating the effect of house ownership patterns and rental status on energy choices for lighting and cooking within the context of Rwanda. Unlike Ghana, Rwanda has a unique house ownership policy which could have implications on the findings of Martey (2019). As an extension, our study explores the heterogeneous effect of tenancy on energy choices across gender of households’ heads and households’ geographical location (rural–urban). Using a bivariate probit model and the fifth Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey data of Rwanda, we find that rental status and dwelling type have varying effects on cooking and lighting fuel choices. Our results show that renters relative to owner-occupants in urban households are more likely to use transition fuels like charcoal for cooking than in rural areas. The result for lighting energy is, however, inconclusive for rural and urban households. We find that female-headed households are more likely to adopt cleaner cooking energy choices. The study only partly supports the energy ladder hypothesis which suggests how evidence does not always provide conclusive support of this hypothesis.
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| 9. |
- Wong, Grace, et al.
(författare)
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The making of resource frontier spaces in the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia : A critical analysis of narratives, actors and drivers in the scientific literature
- 2022
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Ingår i: World development perspectives. - : Elsevier BV. - 2452-2929. ; 27
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Forest frontiers are rapidly changing to sites of commodity agriculture throughout the tropics, with far-reaching transformations in landscapes and livelihoods. Many of the dynamics that drive frontier commodification are well-rehearsed since colonial times. Policies to deregulate markets, privatize or formalize land tenure and open borders to trade have stimulated resource exploitation. The accompanying territorial interventions such as new enclosures, reconfigured property regimes and claims are purposefully employed to create space and labor, and have radically reconfigured the relationships of millions of people to land and rule. Narratives of what is an opportunity for whom, who should benefit from these spaces, and what is a problem in need of a solution have shaped policies and development choices in frontiers over time. Science plays a critical role, by putting forward particular knowledge and understandings, contributing to problematisations and promoting or legitimating certain solutions. In this paper, we review how science has portrayed forest frontiers in the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia. We analyse storylines put forward in the scientific literature and find three dominant narratives that intersect and reinforce each other to legitimate colonial exploitation of forest and land resources, and the enactment of colonial forest and land codes that have laid a deep-seated path in post-colonial policies. The narratives focus on imaginings of frontier regions as spaces that are idle or empty, and where possibilities for extraction, conservation and development appear unlimited; the problematization of smallholder and shifting cultivation farming as practices in need of change; and the legitimation of capitalist and market-based rationales as solutions. We find these narratives to be largely similar across both the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia and persistent in contemporary policies and global development strategies. This analysis allows for a deeper understanding of how commodification of frontiers came about, and what role science can play for a more just development.
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