TY - JOUR
T1 - Forests as pathways to prosperity
T2 - Empirical insights and conceptual advances
AU - Miller, Daniel C.
AU - Hajjar, Reem
N1 - Funding Information:
Research for this article was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture , Hatch project 1009327 (D.C.M.). The papers compiled in this special issue were supported by the Program on Forests (PROFOR) at the World Bank . We gratefully acknowledge research assistance by Roberta Afonso and Katia Nakamura. We thank all the authors contributing to this Special Issue and Arun Agrawal, Diji Chandrasekharan, and Nalin Kishor for initial discussion that helped spark this work. Sofia Ahlroth, Festus Amadu, Pamela Jagger, Duncan MacQueen, Johan Oldekop, Pushpendra Rana, Gill Shepherd, Priya Shymsandar and participants in a session on forests as pathways to prosperity at the December 2016 Forests and Livelihoods: Assessment, Research, and Engagement (FLARE) conference in Edinburgh provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We thank Joanna Broderick for her excellent editing. Any errors remain our own.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2020/1
Y1 - 2020/1
N2 - The role of forests in supporting current consumption and helping people cope with seasonal, climatic, and other stressors is increasingly well understood. But can forests help rural households climb out of poverty? And can forests provide a pathway to prosperity that includes more widely shared economic benefits and improvements in other aspects of human well-being? This introduction to the Special Issue on “Forests as Pathways to Prosperity” reviews the literature on forest livelihoods in developing countries to synthesize evidence relating to these questions. We find that available research primarily examines poverty mitigation aspects of forests rather than the potential role of forest conservation, management, and use in alleviating poverty or promoting broader prosperity. To increase understanding of forest-livelihood relationships we propose a framework based on the concept of prosperity, which draws particular attention to human well-being beyond economic and material dimensions. We argue that explicitly taking a more expansive view can enable better accounting for the diverse ways forests contribute to human welfare, expand the constituency for forests, and inform policies to more sustainably manage forests within wider landscapes. Together, our review and the other articles in this volume advance these objectives by providing new analytical frameworks, empirical insights, and theoretical understanding to build knowledge on linkages between forests, poverty, and broader prosperity.
AB - The role of forests in supporting current consumption and helping people cope with seasonal, climatic, and other stressors is increasingly well understood. But can forests help rural households climb out of poverty? And can forests provide a pathway to prosperity that includes more widely shared economic benefits and improvements in other aspects of human well-being? This introduction to the Special Issue on “Forests as Pathways to Prosperity” reviews the literature on forest livelihoods in developing countries to synthesize evidence relating to these questions. We find that available research primarily examines poverty mitigation aspects of forests rather than the potential role of forest conservation, management, and use in alleviating poverty or promoting broader prosperity. To increase understanding of forest-livelihood relationships we propose a framework based on the concept of prosperity, which draws particular attention to human well-being beyond economic and material dimensions. We argue that explicitly taking a more expansive view can enable better accounting for the diverse ways forests contribute to human welfare, expand the constituency for forests, and inform policies to more sustainably manage forests within wider landscapes. Together, our review and the other articles in this volume advance these objectives by providing new analytical frameworks, empirical insights, and theoretical understanding to build knowledge on linkages between forests, poverty, and broader prosperity.
KW - Forest based livelihoods
KW - Forest conservation
KW - Human well-being
KW - Poverty traps
KW - Sustainable forest management
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U2 - 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104647
DO - 10.1016/j.worlddev.2019.104647
M3 - Editorial
AN - SCOPUS:85070809872
SN - 0305-750X
VL - 125
JO - World Development
JF - World Development
M1 - 104647
ER -