Community-based natural resource management: an effective tool to reduce poverty and inequality?

ABSTRACT

With exclusive property rights, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) may provide economies of scale and scope in a joint production system. This paper examines the impact of CBNRM on poverty and inequality, using household-level panel data from Bangladesh. Results from the propensity score matching method and the random effect models reveal that project participants' employment increased by 60 person-days, and their fish income increased by 37.4%. We find a positive significant effect of the project in reducing both the incidence and depth of poverty and income inequality. The findings suggest CBNRM is an effective tool to achieve sustainable development goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based natural resource management
• poverty
• inequality
• property rights
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Prof. Gerald Shively, Prof Frank Asche, and Prof. Madan Dey for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper, and those attending the presentation of earlier versions of this paper at the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, for their comments and suggestions. All errors are our responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The target population was those who depended on the floodplain for their income. The surrounding villages and communities were identified through secondary information from the local Upazila Fisheries Office conducting participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and focus group discussions (FGD).

2. Hausman test: H₀: The null hypothesis is that the preferred model is random effects compared to fixed effects (i.e. the random effect estimator is consistent and efficient).

Chi2 (6) = 3.15

Prob>chi2 = 0.7896

3. Here $R_f=\mathit{Cov}\left\{Y_f,\mathit{F}\left(\mathit{Y}\right)\right\}/\mathit{Cov}\left\{Y_f,\mathit{F}\left(Y_f\right)\right\}$ where $\mathit{F}\left(\mathit{Y}\right)\mathit{andF}\left(Y_f\right)$ represent the cumulative distribution of total income and income from source f.

4. Incomes for 2008 and 2009 were deflated by the 2007 CPI.

5. A high value of the Gini coefficient for any income source does not necessarily mean that it has an unequalising effect on total inequality and disfavours the poor. López-Feldman, Mora, and Taylor (2007) have shown that income from natural resource extraction is unequally distributed in Mexico but favours the poor.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akhtaruzzaman Khan

Dr. Md. Akhtaruzzaman Khan is an agro-economist and has been teaching at Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) since 2002 in the Department of Agricultural Finance and Banking. Having Ph.D. in Economics from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway in 2012, his research focuses on various aspects of agricultural economics that includes resource and environmental economics, supply and value chain analysis, post-harvest losses, efficiency and risk modelling at farm level, impact evaluation, poverty and livelihood of vulnerable people, etc. His research is funded by various national and international agencies like United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), World Bank (WB), International Development Association (IDA), Asian Development Bank (ADB), etc. He has published over 86 research articles, 24 monographs, and one book.

Khan Jahirul Islam

Dr. Khan Jahirul Islam holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba. He was an instructor at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg, before being hired as a lecturer in economics at the University of British Columbia, in August 2016. His major fields of research are Economic Development, Financial Inclusion, and Public Policy. Khan has published a book chapter and scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals including the World Development, Journal of International Development, and International Journal of Economic Theory. Khan’s ongoing research projects include analyzing households’ vulnerability to poverty in Canada, the credit card debt puzzle in Canada, the financial stress of Canadian households, and multidimensional poverty in Bangladesh.

A.B.M. Mahfuzul Haque

A.B.M. Mahfuzul Haque is a Research Fellow of WorldFish Bangladesh and the South Asia office, Dhaka, Bangladesh. A Diploma in Community-Based Development from St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, and Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Wageningen University, the Netherlands; he has more than 20 years of experience in Research and Development. He is interested in community-based fish culture, integrated agriculture-aquaculture technology adoption and dissemination, integrated floodplain management, social and natural resources management in coastal & marine, monitoring evaluation and impact assessment. Twenty of his research papers have been published in international and national journals. He is simultaneously working as a Monitoring Evaluation Learning (MEL) Manager at WorldFish.