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A microeconomic analysis of household forest plantation in the northern uplands of Vietnam : contributions to payments for environmental services policy
No full textIt is uncontested that forests are imperative for environmental conservation and economic development. Benefits from forests are immense and multidimensional: Forests can support local livelihoods, assist poverty alleviation, and provide environmental services for local communities and greater society. Over the past 50 years, about half of the worlds original forest cover has been lost. Vietnam is among the countries where forest degradation is a serious issue. Several measures have been implemented to alleviate forest degradation, including forest land allocation and forest plantation programs. The current and growing international interest of civil society and governments in the acknowledgement of forest environmental services has become mainstream: Vietnam is among several countries who appreciate the need for payment or compensation to local communities for forest values through the payment for environmental services (PES) mechanism. Since 2010, Vietnam has officially introduced a payments for forest environmental services (PFES) scheme to pursue conservation and development goals. However, there is still a lack of knowledge for farmers preferences for policy design and implementation. In spite of a number of studies examining the impacts of forest policies in northern Vietnam, there is limited research on incentive and forest management at the household level. Such an analysis would provide insightful information and entail implications for PES policy, especially in terms of effective participation and cost efficiency. This dissertation attempts to fill this research gap by examining farmers behavior on forest management and their experiences with forest policies that are necessary for determining effective incentives that can bring about changes in behavior related to forest conservation practice in a mountainous area. The research is based on two survey rounds of 300 representative households in Da Bac district, located in the upstream area of the Hoa Binh reservoir in the northwestern region of Vietnam.
As previous afforestation programs are based on a top-down approach, this dissertation contributes to the limited research on the potential demand for and farmers preferences in forest management. The analysis provides policy implications for a PES scheme where voluntary participation and cost efficiency are crucial for its success. This dissertation also contributes to a small but growing body of literature on choice experiment application to the field of forest conservation schemes in developing countries. In addition, the analysis of Transaction Costs (TCs) borne by households under the forest management scheme can contribute to the limited number of studies that have empirically analyzed private TCs, particularly in developing countries.
The results of our research underline the inadequacy of previous forest plantation support and recommend that when land is limited, higher financial incentives are needed to make forest conservation attractive in a PES scheme. Depending on the contract, there exists a potential demand for forest conservation with a small subsidy or even without a subsidy if extra land is allocated. This suggests that policymakers should integrate land allocation into PES policies to obtain better cost efficiency. As the results indicate that households have different degrees of willingness to participate in forest conservation programs, we recommend that policies target PES campaigns to households who have less interest in forest conservation, such as households with livelihoods that depend mainly on agricultural production, who have not previously joined the forest programs either due to their ineligibility or distrust in local government authorities, and who have limited market access due to poor road conditions. In addition, given that the security of forests influences the decision to plant forest, strengthening monitoring mechanism or introducing insurance to reduce the risk of plantation failure is recommended as another option to promote participation.
This dissertation reveals that the amount of incentives that farmers are willing to accept to plant and conserve forest instead of engaging in farming activities is higher than previous subsidies. In mountainous areas where ethnic minorities still live in poverty, a higher subsidy is expected to achieve both environmental conservation and poverty alleviation outcomes. Nevertheless, a critical question arises as to whether a higher subsidy can lead to sustainable household forest management. This question should be addressed by future research by examining longitudinal data on household livelihood and forest management under a PES scheme. It has not been possible to empirically measure TCs of farmers engaged in community-based forest management where such information would provide interesting results on this matter. The implications on this study could be developed further by expanding the survey and gathering data from participants of community-based forest management. Further research on the comparison of TCs associated with community and individual management is recommended to provide information to policymakers and researchers.Es ist unbestritten, dass Wald unverzichtbar sowohl für den Umweltschutz als auch für die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung ist. Der Nutzen von Wald ist enorm: Wälder sind Lebensgrundlage für die lokale Bevölkerung, unterstützen Armutsminderung und bieten Umweltdienstleistungen für Gemeinden vor Ort und die weitere Gesellschaft. In den letzten 50 Jahren hat sich die Waldfläche global um ungefähr die Hälfte verringert. Vietnam gehört zu den Ländern, in denen Entwaldung ein schwerwiegendes Problem darstellt. Eine Reihe von Maßnahmen wurde eingeführt um Entwaldung abzumildern, darunter die Zuteilung von Waldflächen sowie Aufforstungsprogramme. Das gegenwärtige und wachsende internationale Interesse von Zivilgesellschaft und Regierung an der Würdigung von Waldumweltdienstleistungen ist zum Mainstream geworden: Vietnam ist ein Land unter vielen, das die Notwendigkeit einer Bezahlung oder Entschädigung für Wälder im Rahmen des PES-Mechanismus (Bezahlung für Umweltdienstleistungen) für Gemeinden anerkennt. 2010 hat Vietnam offiziell ein PFES-Programm (Bezahlung für Waldumweltdienstleistungen) eingeführt, um Walderhaltungs- und Entwicklungsziele zu verfolgen. Die Präferenzen von Landwirten für Politikgestaltung und Programmimplementierung sind jedoch noch nicht bekannt. Trotz mehrerer Studien, die die Auswirkungen von Waldprogrammen im Norden Vietnams untersuchen, gibt es nur wenig Forschung zu Anreizen und Waldbewirtschaftung auf Haushaltsebene. Eine solche Analyse würde aufschlussreiche Informationen und Schlussfolgerungen für das PES-Programm liefern, insbesondere hinsichtlich wirksamer Beteiligung und Kosteneffizienz. Die vorliegende Dissertation versucht diese Forschungslücke zu schließen, indem sie das Verhalten der Landwirte bei der Waldbewirtschaftung und ihre Erfahrungen mit Forstprogrammen untersucht. Das ist notwendig um wirksame Anreize festzulegen, die Verhaltensänderungen hinsichtlich Walderhaltungspraktiken in Bergregionen herbeiführen können. Basis dieser Studie sind zwei Haushaltsumfragen mit 300 repräsentativen Haushalten im Da Bac-Bezirk, oberhalb des Hoa Binh-Stausees im Nordwesten Vietnams.
Da frühere Aufforstungsprogramme auf einem Top-down-Ansatz basieren, leistet diese Dissertation einen Beitrag zur begrenzten Forschung zu potenzieller Nachfrage nach Waldbewirtschaftung und Präferenzen der Landwirte bei. Die Analyse liefert politische Implikationen für PES-Vorhaben, in denen Freiwilligkeit und Kosteneffizienz entscheidend für deren Erfolg sind. Diese Dissertation trägt ebenfalls zur kleinen aber wachsenden Literatur über die Anwendung von Choice-Experimenten im Rahmen von Walderhaltungsprogrammen in Entwicklungsländern bei. Darüber hinaus kann die Analyse der TK, die bei Haushalten im Rahmen von Waldbewirtschaftungsprogrammen besonders in Entwicklungsländern anfallen, zur begrenzten Anzahl an Studien, die private TK empirisch analysiert haben, beitragen.
Die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Forschung betonen die Unzulänglichkeiten früherer Aufforstungsprogramme und empfehlen im Falle von begrenzter Fläche höhere finanzielle Anreize, um Walderhaltung in einem PES-Programm attraktiv zu machen. Abhängig vom Vertrag gibt es eine potenzielle Nachfrage nach Walderhaltung mit einer niedrigen Förderung oder sogar ohne Zuschuss wenn zusätzliches Land zugeteilt wird. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass politische Entscheidungsträger Landzuteilung in PES-Programme integrieren sollten, um eine höhere Kosteneffizienz zu erreichen. Da die Ergebnisse aussagen, dass Haushalte ein unterschiedliches Ausmaß an Bereitschaft zur Teilnahme in Walderhaltungsprogrammen haben, wird empfohlen, dass PES-Kampagnen sich auf Haushalte mit weniger Interesse an Walderhaltung richten, wie Haushalte, deren Lebensgrundlage hauptsächlich auf landwirtschaftlicher Produktion beruht, Haushalte, die bisher nicht für die Teilnahme Waldprogrammen berechtigt waren oder aufgrund von Misstrauen gegenüber den örtlichen Behörden nicht teilgenommen haben und Haushalte, die begrenzten Marktzugang aufgrund mangelhaften Straßen haben. Da der Schutz des Waldes die Entscheidung zur Aufforstung beeinflusst, wird als eine zusätzliche Möglichkeit zur Förderung der Teilnahme empfohlen, Überwachungsmechanismen zu stärken oder Versicherungen zur Reduzierung von Aufforstungsrisiken einzuführen.
Diese Dissertation zeigt auf, dass die Höhe der Anreize, bei der Landwirte bereit sind, aufzuforsten und den Wald zu erhalten, anstatt andere landwirtschaftliche Aktivitäten auszuüben, höher sind als frühere Subventionen. In Bergregionen, wo ethnische Minderheiten noch in Armut leben, wird eine höhere Förderung erwartet, um sowohl Umweltschutz als auch Armutsminderung zu erreichen. Nichtsdestotrotz stellt sich die Frage, ob eine höhere Förderung zu einer nachhaltigen Waldbewirtschaftung auf Haushaltsebene führt. Diese Frage sollte im Rahmen zukünftiger Forschung geklärt werden, mithilfe der Untersuchung von Längsschnittdaten auf die Lebensgrundlage und die Waldbewirtschaftung im Rahmen eines PES-Programms. Es war nicht möglich, TK von Landwirten, die in ihrer Gemeinde an einer gemeinsamen Waldbewirtschaftung beteiligt sind, wo solche Informationen interessante Ergebnisse liefern würden, empirisch zu messen. Die Implikationen dieser Studie könnten weiter entwickelt werden, wenn Umfrage und Datenerhebung von Teilnehmern der von lokalen Gemeinschaften getragenen Waldbewirtschaftung ausgeweitet werden. Weitere Forschung zum Vergleich von TK, wie sie bei Gemeinde- und individueller Bewirtschaftung anfallen, wird empfohlen, um politischen Entscheidungsträgern und Forschern Informationen zur Verfügung zu stellen
Evaluating the Student Loan Fund of Thailand
No full textThe Thai higher education sector has expanded quickly during the past decade, making a transition from an elitist to a mass institution. A driving force behind the expansion was believed to be the Student Loan Fund (SLF), introduced in 1996. During the first 10 years of its operation, the SLF has lent to more than 2.6 million students, with the loan value totaling $5.7 billion. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of the scheme. This paper provides a very first attempt to evaluate the SLF. We found that it had serious weaknesses in terms of loan screening; delay in loan disbursement and low collection rate. We also found that it failed to promote enrollment in higher education, except for students from poor households.Student loan Higher education
Adaptive capacity of households and institutions in dealing with floods in Chiang Mai, Thailand
No full textChiang Mai Province was chosen as the study area for its long history of flooding. The study shows that at an institutional level, flood mitigation plans of local authorities focused narrowly on structural measures, which were carried out piecemeal at different jurisdictions, while development planning did not take into account flood mitigation and adaptation needs. Faced with recurrent floods, rural households were better prepared than urban households. The over reliance on public flood protection measures may deter households from taking precautions. The study therefore recommends increasing public knowledge and awareness about flood preparedness among households and institutions
Adaptation strategies to address coastal erosion/flooding : a case study of the communities in Bang Khun Thian district, Bangkok, Thailand
Get PDFThis study determines that individual households’ adaptation strategies to address coastal erosion/flooding are most often in the form of stone breakwaters, bamboo revetments, and dike heightening. However, not all households engage in protective measures. According to engineering knowledge for coastal protection, the protection structure needs to be built along the entire shoreline to be effective and needs to be designed for the whole Upper Gulf of Thailand. The existing government’s assistance for coastal erosion/flooding is in the form of a stone breakwater (which is ineffective) along with flooding compensation. A breakwater/dike structure will require the support of the national government
Transaction costs of farmers’ participation in forest management: Policy implications of payments for environmental services schemes in Vietnam
No full textGedruckte Ausg. im Verlag Kassel Univ. Press (www.upress.uni-kassel.de) erschienen
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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