Social and Ecological Synergy: Local Rulemaking, Forest Livelihoods, and Biodiversity Conservation
Abstract
Causal pathways to achieve social and ecological benefits from forests are unclear, because there are few systematic multicountry empirical analyses that identify important factors and their complex relationships with social and ecological outcomes. This study examines biodiversity conservation and forest-based livelihood outcomes using a data set on 84 sites from six countries in East Africa and South Asia. We find both positive and negative relationships, leading to joint wins, losses, and trade-offs depending on specific contextual factors; participation in forest governance institutions by local forest users is strongly associated with jointly positive outcomes for forests in our study.
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Published In
Science
Volume 331 | Issue 6024
25 March 2011
25 March 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 20 October 2010
Accepted: 1 February 2011
Published in print: 25 March 2011
Acknowledgments
We thank E. Ostrom, T. Hayes, two anonymous reviewers, and members of the Development, Sustainable Livelihoods and Conservation (DESULICO) group for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and R. Kornak and J. England for assistance with data cleaning. We gratefully acknowledge the many researchers affiliated with IFRI as Collaborating Research Centers for their data contributions and ongoing involvement with the IFRI network. This work was funded by the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, National Science Foundation grants BCS-0703073 and CNH-0709545, and a University of Michigan OVPR/Rackham grant for an Annual Institute on Joint Outcomes related to Sustainability.
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