Measuring Livelihoods and Environmental Dependence

by Angelsen, Arild; Larsen, Helle Overgaard; Lund, Jens Friis; Smith-hall, Carsten; Wunder, Sven

• ISBN13: 9781849711333
• ISBN10: 184971133X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-05-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Thousands of surveys on rural livelihoods in developing countries are being done every year. Unfortunately, many suffer from weaknesses in methods and problems in implementation. Quantifying households' dependence on multiple environmental resources (forests, bush, grasslands and rivers) is particularly difficult and often simply ignored in the surveys. The results therefore do not reflect rural realities. In particular, 'the hidden harvest' from natural resources is generally too important to livelihoods for development research, policies and practice to ignore. Fieldwork using state-of-the-art methods, and in particular well-designed household questionnaires, thus becomes an imperative to adequately capture key dimensions of rural welfare.This book describes how to do a better job when designing and implementing household and village surveys for quantitative assessment of rural livelihoods in developing countries. It covers the entire research process from planning to sharing research results. It draws on the experiences from a large global-comparative project, the Poverty Environment Network (PEN), to develop more robust and validated methods, enriched by numerous practical examples from the field. The book will provide an invaluable guide to methods and a practical handbook for students and professionals.

Author Biography

Arild Angelsen is a Professor at the Department of Economics Resource Management at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB) and a Senior Associate of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Indonesia. Helle Overgaard Larsen is an Associate Professor at Forest Landscape Denmark at the University of Copenhagen. Jens Friis Lund is an Associate Professor at Forest Landscape Denmark at the University of Copenhagen. Carsten Smith-Hall is a Professor at Forest Landscape Denmark at the University of Copenhagen. Sven Wunder is a Principal Economist at the Center for International Forestry Research, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Table of Contents

List of Figures, Tables and Boxes	p. ix
Contributors	p. xii
Foreword	p. xv
Preface	p. xvi
Acronyms and Abbreviations	p. xviii
Why Measure Rural Livelihoods and Environmental Dependence?	p. 1
Why Do Field Research?	p. 17
Composing a Research Proposal	p. 33
Sampling: Who, How and How Many?	p. 51
Collecting Contextual Information	p. 71
The Division of Labour Between Village, Household and Other Surveys	p. 89
Designing the Household Questionnaire	p. 107
Valuing the Priceless: What Are Non-Marketed Products Worth?	p. 127
Preparing for the Field: Managing AND Enjoying Fieldwork	p. 147
Hiring, Training and Managing a Field Team	p. 163
Getting Quality Data	p. 175
Data Entry and Quality Checking	p. 191
An Introduction to Data Analysis	p. 209
Communicating Research for Influence and Impact	p. 227
Index	p. 247
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