Browsing by Author "Albers, H. J."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Implementing REDD through Community-Based Forest Management: Lessons from Tanzania
    (Natural Resource Forum, A United Nations Sustainable Development Journal, 2013) Robinson, E. J. Z.; Albers, H. J.; Lokina, Razack B.; Meshack, C.
    REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) aims to slow carbon releases caused by forest disturbance by making payments conditional on forest quality over time. Like earlier policies to slow deforestation, REDD must change the behaviour of forest degraders. Broadly, it can be implemented with payments to potential forest degraders, thus creating incentives; through payments for enforcement, thus creating disincentives; or through addressing external drivers such as urban charcoal demand. In Tanzania, community-based forest management (CBFM), a form of participatory forest management (PFM), was chosen as the model for implementing REDD pilot programs. Payments are made to villages that have the rights to forest carbon. In exchange for these payments, the villages must demonstrably reduce deforestation at the village level. Using this pilot program as a case study, we provide insights for REDD implementation in sub-Saharan Africa. We pay particular attention to leakage, monitoring and enforcement. We suggest that implementing REDD through CBFM-type structures can create appropriate incentives and behavioural change when the recipients of the REDD funds are also the key drivers of forest change. When external forces drive forest change, however, REDD through CBFM-type structures becomes an enforcement program, with local communities rather than government agencies being responsible for the enforcement. That structure imposes costs on local communities, whose local authority limits the ability to address leakage outside the particular REDD village. In addition, for REDD to lead to lower emissions, implementation will have to emphasize conditionality of payments on measurable decreases in forest loss.
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    Insiders, outsiders, and the role of local enforcement in forest management: An example from Tanzania
    (Ecological Economics, 2014) Robinson, E. J. Z.; Albers, H. J.; Ngeleza, G.; Lokina, Razack B.
    Typically both local villagers (―insiders‖) and non-locals (―outsiders‖) extract products from protected forests even though the activities are illegal. Our paper suggests that, depending on the relative ecological damage caused by each group, budget-constrained forest managers may be able to reduce total forest degradation by legalizing ―insider‖ extraction in return for local villagers involvement in enforcement activities. We illustrate this through the development of a game-theoretic model that considers explicitly the interaction between the forest manager who can combine a limited enforcement budget with legalization of insider resource extraction and livelihood projects such as bee keeping, insider villagers, and outsider charcoal producers.
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    Kibaha Tanzania’s Forest Protection, Poverty Alleviation Projects, NTFPs and Charcoal Production: Modelling Multiple Tools, Goals, and Actors
    (EDE, 2010) Robinson, E. J. Z.; Lokina, Razack B.; Albers, H. J.; Ngeleza, N.
    During the last 30 years, the number of protected areas worldwide established to protect natural systems grew dramatically. Coinciding with that expansion, many government agencies and conservation NGOs advocate for combinations of development/livelihood policies and conservation policies attempt to address rural poverty while conserving forests (Naughton-Treves, et al., 2005). For example, WWF’s policy on forest and poverty states that “national and international forest policies and the conservation movement should address both the sustainable management of natural forests and rural poverty alleviation; one should never be addressed at the other’ s expense” (Gutman, 2001; p.9, para 1). The economics literature discussing policies aimed at conservation and poverty, such as Community-based Forest Management (CBFM), Joint Forest Management (JFM), and their predecessor Integrated ConservationDevelopment Projects (ICDPs), emphasizes their failure to create incentives for conservation by rural people (see Hughes and Flintan, 2001, for a literature review; Behera and Engel, 2006; Ghimire, 1994; Johannesen, and Skonhoft, 2005; Ligon and Narain, 1999; Muller and Albers, 2004; and Shyamsundar, 1996). Despite the lack of well-established mechanisms to induce conservation through poverty alleviation projects in and around parks, many parks have managers or NGOs implementing such projects,often with an emphasis on compensation for lost access to resources, poverty alleviation, and generating goodwill.
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    Protecting Forests and Forest Based Livelihoods: Modeling Multiple Tools, Goals, and Actors
    (Forest Policy and Economics, 2010) Robinson, E. J. Z.; Lokina, Razack B.; Albers, H. J.
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    The Role of Incentives for Sustainable Implementation of Marine Protected Areas: An Example From Tanzania
    (2011-12) Robinson, Elizabeth J. Z.; Albers, H. J.; Kirama, Stephen
    Although Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) provide an increasingly popular policy tool for protecting marine stocks and biodiversity, they pose high costs for small-scale fisherfolk who have few alternative livelihood options in poor countries. MPAs often address this burden on local households by providing some benefits to compensate locals and/or induce compliance with restrictions. We argue that MPAs in poor countries can only contribute to sustainability if management induces changes in resource-dependent households’ incentives to fish. With Tanzania’s Mnazi Bay Ruvuma Estuary Marine Park (MBREMP) and its internal villages as an example, we use an economic decision modeling framework as a lens to examine incentives, reaction to incentives, and implications for sustainable MPA management created by park managers’ use of enforcement (“sticks”) and livelihood projects (“carrots”). We emphasize practical implementation issues faced by MBREMP managers and implications for fostering marine ecosystem sustainability in a poor country setting.