Klaas van 't Veld

Poverty and the Environment: Exploring the Relationship Between Household Incomes, Private Assets, and Natural Assets

This paper develops an analytical framework to examine how rural households in developing countries derive income from common-pool natural resource stocks. The focus is on how three types of private assets—land, livestock, and human capital—and one household characteristic—its size—interact with the natural assets to form the basis of household livelihood strategies. Predictions of the model are tested using purpose-collected data from rural households in Jhabua, India. Implications of our results for the potential of improved natural resource management to alleviate poverty are discussed.

India's Firewood Crisis Re-Examined

Households in rural India are highly dependent on firewood as their main source of energy, partly because non-biofuels tend to be expensive. The prevailing view is therefore that, when faced with shortages of firewood in the village commons, such households, and especially the women in them, have to spend more and more time searching for firewood and eventually settle for poorer-quality biomass such as twigs, branches and dry leaves. Using data from a random sample of rural households in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, we come to very different conclusions, however. We find that households in villages with degraded forests do not spend longer hours searching for firewood, but instead switch to either using firewood from private trees or to using agricultural waste for fuel. In the long run, moreover, households respond to the firewood shortage by altering the mix of private trees on their land in favor of firewood, as opposed to fruit, trees. We find also that, Joint Forest Management, a government program initiated in the 1990s, is having a positive impact on the firewood economy.

Environmental Federalism with Regards to Accidental Pollution

Environmental policy, focusing on the control of pollution and on over-exploitation, easily overlooks the extensive range of interconnections between economic activities and natural systems. In this timely book, a number of specialists examine how crucial aspects of complex environmental problems and policy can be dealt with in decentralized governmental systems.