Governing the Commons

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Analyzing Health Equity Using Household Survey Data: A Guide to Techniques and Their Implementation

Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women's Presence Within and Beyond Community Forestry

Rural communities in Thailand have long managed and used forest resources for their livelihoods. Using survey data collected from 400 households across two villages in northeastern Thailand, this s...

Factors influencing household participation in community forest management: evidence from Udon Thani Province, Thailand

Exclosures in people’s minds: perceptions and attitudes in the Tigray region, Ethiopia

Does gender matter in people's attitudes and cooperation in community-based natural resource management? If so, how do gender differences in conservation-related attitudes help or hinder sustaining the commons? Since biases ingrained in community norms and expectations often exclude women from decision making in co-management, it is imperative to find plausible answers to these queries in order to understand gender relations and cooperation in co-management. To this end, the authors conducted psychometric surveys and trust experiments on 196 forest-dependent households in West Bengal, India during 2009–2010. The findings suggest that, despite an overall negative perception about women's involvement in co-management, women are more conservation friendly and pro-social than men. It is also noticed that forest biomass and forest incomes as the indicators of sustainability have increased in those forest communities where women's proportional strength as decision makers is greater and people hold an overall positive conservation attitude.

Attitudes and cooperation: does gender matter in community-based forest management?

Does status matter in community-based forest management? If so, are the high-status households more benefited than the low-status households? What drives status differences, if any, in the appropriation of forest resources? To address these questions, we draw on a theory of status and resource use that defines one’s status as one’s relative position in a group on the basis of power, prestige, honor and deference. Following this perspective, we surveyed the heads of 341 forest-based rural households in India from 2009 to 2010. We find that collective actions themselves are status-driven and the high-status households are more interested and involved in status-maintaining collective actions such as decision-making and implementation, while the low-status households perform general tasks like forest patrol. Moreover, the high-status households derive benefits from local forest significantly more than the low-status households. Further, decomposition analysis shows that a household’s prestige and honor measured by its access to social resources, problem faced and useful contacts explain about 56 % of the status gap in forest benefits, while socioeconomic characteristics explain only 16 % of the gap. Thus, due emphasis on household status from a broader socioeconomic perspective is required to reduce inequality in participation and the distribution of forest benefits in co-management.

Status differences in collective action and forest benefits: evidence from joint forest management in India

To what extent forests contribute to rural livelihoods in developing countries? To find a plausible answer for this, this article explores whether inclusion of forest income to rural households’ to...

Forest Income and Rural Livelihoods in West Bengal, India:

Around 44 billion digital transactions were recorded across India during the financial year 2021. Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit India, a significant growth in the number of digital payments has also occurred. The value of transaction is estimated to rise up to 385 trillion Indian rupees by the financial year 2026 (Statista, 2022). Given this importance of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) usage, we surveyed 205 respondents from rural and urban West Bengal to explore the determinants of UPI usage and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on UPI use, if any. We used logistic regression and independent sample t-test and found that males and younger individuals use UPI more than females and aged persons, while we do not see any difference in usage across income brackets and between rural and urban areas. The implication is that to make India digital, those who use UPI less, such as females and the aged, should be encouraged to participate more in UPI usage.

https://ojs.trp.org.in/index.php/ajms/article/download/3364/2881

Identifying the Major Demographic Factors Determining Unified Payments Interface Usage: A Study Based on West Bengal

In the recent times, to stimulate the educational potential as well as to stop the early marriages of female child, West Bengal Government, with the expertise of Ministry of Department of Women development and Social Welfare (DWD&SD) curated a cash incentive scheme called Kanyashree Prakalpa, launched in the year of 2013, dated 8th April. The main objective of the scheme was to promote higher education as well as stop child marriage, which will showcase a decrease in the mortality rate of both mother and child.The implementation of Kanyashree Prakalpa was done and became a success, but what is the present scenario regarding the scheme?Thepaper specifically caters the educational aspect of Kanyashree Prakalpa and from the results it was determined whether the scheme has served its purpose in the current setting.The findings of this study suggest that Kanyashree had positive impact on female admission rate in rural area and dropout rate in both rural and urban areas.

Promita Mukherjee

Papers

Attitudes and cooperation: does gender matter in community-based forest management?

Status differences in collective action and forest benefits: evidence from joint forest management in India

Forest Income and Rural Livelihoods in West Bengal, India:

Identifying the Major Demographic Factors Determining Unified Payments Interface Usage: A Study Based on West Bengal

Exploring the link between kanyashree prakalpa and girl child education