This paper analyzes how women’s participation affects institutional outcomes related to the decentralized governance of community forests in Madhya Pradesh, India. The analysis is based on data from a representative sample of 641 cases of joint forest management, India’s flagship program to involve communities in forest governance. We focus on two outcomes relevant for local livelihoods: control of illicit grazing and control of illicit felling in the forest.

The devolution of natural resource management responsibility from the state to communities or local user groups has become a widespread trend that cuts across countries and resource sectors. Unlike claims to the contrary in policy narratives, devolution of control over resources from the state to local organizations does not necessarily lead to greater participation and empowerment of all stakeholders (Cleaver 1999).

Mexico’s Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) is a major government program aimed at developing the human capital of poor households. Targeting its benefits directly to the population in extreme poverty in rural areas, it seeks to alleviate current poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as to reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health, and nutrition.

This paper presents evidence on rural Ethiopian households’ time allocation to different activities, especially fuel collection work, and examines the effect of changes in the availability of firewood resources on households’ time allocation to fuel collection and on- and off-farm income generation.

"In 1993, India introduced quota-based political reservations for women in rural areas with the objective to promote gender equality in human development by making rural service provision and local governance inclusive and responsive to the needs of women. Recent evidence shows that reservation policies for women (1) stimulate the political participation of women in rural areas, (2) shift rural service provision to public goods that reflect gender preferences, and (3) improve the access to and the quality of public services.

Based on a survey of 60 villages in Western Ghana, where cocoa is the dominant crop, this study explores evolutionary changes in land tenure institutions on women's land rights and the efficiency of tree resource management....With increasing population pressure, customary land tenure institutions in Western Ghana have evolved toward individualized systems in order to provide appropriate incentives to invest in tree planting and management. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, individualization of land rights has strengthened women’s rights to land.

This paper examines the equity implications of the evolution of land rights from communal land tenure to individualization in customary land areas in Western Sumatra. This brief sets forth policy implications: Preference for sons in the inheritance of agroforestry area in the Low Region may be explained by the intensive use of male labor in rubber production; in contrast, both paddy cultivation and cinnamon cultivation in the Middle Region use both male and female family labor relatively equally.

This policy note summarizes the findings of two literature reviews on the gender-differentiated impacts of climate change and the scope for community-based adaptation. It also outlines the framework used to guide these analyses and the other papers summarized in this series.

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This study explores the impact of changes in environmental conditions on household labor allocation to the collection of environmental goods such as fuelwood and leaf fodder for a sample of rural Nepali hill households. Households in rural areas of most developing countries often rely heavily on the surrounding environment for goods such as water, wood, and livestock fodder. Frequently these and other environmental products are collected from local common forestland, a task that in many areas is predominantly carried out by women.

This study explores the impact of changes in land tenure institutions on women’s land rights and the efficiency of tree resource management in western Ghana, where cocoa is the dominant crop. Although communal land tenure aims to provide equitable access to land for all households, women’s land rights in the region are weaker than those of men, as is often the case under customary land tenure systems (Lastarria-Cornhiel 1997).

Assets are an important means of coping with adverse events in developing countries but the role of gendered ownership is not yet fully understood. This paper investigates changes in assets owned by the household head, his spouse, or jointly by both of them in response to shocks in rural agricultural households in Bangladesh with the help of detailed household survey panel data. Land is owned mostly by men, who are wealthier than their spouses with respect to almost all types of assets, but relative ownership varies by type of asset.