Browsing by Author "Evans, Tom"

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2012 Household Questionnaire: Snowmelt Dependent Systems in the United States and Kenya
(2012) Evans, Tom; Cox, Michael; McCord, Paul
"Within water-scarce environments, household characteristics such as family size, income, dependence on markets, and influence of external agents, among others, interact with the biophysical environment to produce socio-hydrological outcomes. Livelihood decisions and outcomes not only are dependent on socio-economic factors such as proximity of employment sources and the number of individuals to tend to farming operations, they are also tied to periodicity of rainfall and the reliability of surface water to maintain livelihood operations. As a result, an understanding of both social and biophysical characteristics is essential when examining coupled outcomes within water-scarce environments. In the Mount Kenya region, livelihoods are heavily dependent on the availability of water, whether through rainfall or surface water. To manage this essential resource, irrigation projects have been established on the western and north-western slopes of the mountain. The management committees of these irrigation projects determine water availability during seasonal dry periods, enforce penalties for water misuse, make repairs to damaged infrastructure, and collect membership and maintenance fees. The ability of the irrigation projects to reliably deliver water is essential in determining the agricultural performance of the member households. The 2012 household questionnaire was designed to understand household characteristics, seasonal water availability, irrigation project management, and, most importantly, how these forces combine to create socio-hydrological outcomes. Such outcomes include household food security, agricultural sustainability, and appropriate water use. The 2012 household survey was administered within five formal irrigation projects which used pipe infrastructure and three formal irrigation projects which relied on direct water extraction from rivers rather than pipe infrastructure. A total of 315 households were visited within the eight irrigation projects."
2012 Manager Questionnaire: Snowmelt Dependent Systems in the United States and Kenya
(2012) Evans, Tom; Cox, Michael; McCord, Paul
"Within water-scarce environments, household characteristics such as family size, income, dependence on markets, and influence of external agents, among others, interact with the biophysical environment to produce socio-hydrological outcomes. Livelihood decisions and outcomes not only are dependent on socio-economic factors such as proximity of employment sources and the number of individuals to tend to farming operations, they are also tied to periodicity of rainfall and the reliability of surface water to maintain livelihood operations. As a result, an understanding of both social and biophysical characteristics is essential when examining coupled outcomes within water-scarce environments. In the Mount Kenya region, livelihoods are heavily dependent on the availability of water, whether through rainfall or surface water. To manage this essential resource, irrigation projects have been established on the western and north-western slopes of the mountain. The management committees of these irrigation projects determine water availability during seasonal dry periods, enforce penalties for water misuse, make repairs to damaged infrastructure, and collect membership and maintenance fees. The ability of the irrigation projects to reliably deliver water is essential in determining the agricultural performance of the member households. The 2012 manager questionnaire was administered to the chairperson of each irrigation project. It was designed to understand attributes of the irrigation projects (such as age of the infrastructure and membership fees), land and water assets of the irrigation project members, agricultural activities taking place within the irrigation project, and the rules and norms that exist within the irrigation project. Questions concerning the rules and norms represented the majority of manager survey questions, as the inner workings of the irrigation projects are revealed through examination of monitoring structures, monetary penalties, participation in project meetings, distribution of water during low flow periods, and coordination with other irrigation projects. The 2012 manager survey was administered within eight irrigation projects."
2013 Care Taker Questionnaire: Snowmelt Dependent Systems in the United States and Kenya
(2013) Evans, Tom; McCord, Paul; Dell'Angelo, Jampel
"Within water-scarce environments, household characteristics such as family size, income, dependence on markets, and influence of external agents, among others, interact with the biophysical environment to produce socio-hydrological outcomes. Livelihood decisions and outcomes not only are dependent on socio-economic factors such as proximity of employment sources and the number of individuals to tend to farming operations, they are also tied to periodicity of rainfall and the reliability of surface water to maintain livelihood operations. As a result, an understanding of both social and biophysical characteristics is essential when examining coupled outcomes within water-scarce environments. In the Mount Kenya region, livelihoods are heavily dependent on the availability of water, whether through rainfall or surface water. To manage this essential resource, irrigation projects have been established on the western and north-western slopes of the mountain. The management committees of these irrigation projects determine water availability during seasonal dry periods, enforce penalties for water misuse, make repairs to damaged infrastructure, and collect membership and maintenance fees. The ability of the irrigation projects to reliably deliver water is essential in determining the agricultural performance of the member households. The 2013 care taker questionnaire was administered to the care taker (primary maintenance person) of each irrigation project. It was designed to understand aspects of the irrigation project’s infrastructure (e.g., the age of the pipes, the size of household pipes, the number of irrigation lines), water rotation schedules, the role of the care taker in enforcing penalties, and the responsiveness of the care taker in resolving member complaints (such as pipe breakages, clogged lines, and overuse of water). The survey was administered to the care takers of twenty-five irrigation projects on the western and north-western slopes of Mount Kenya."
2013 Household Questionnaire: Snowmelt Dependent Systems in the United States and Kenya
(2013) Evans, Tom; McCord, Paul; Dell'Angelo, Jampel
"Within water-scarce environments, household characteristics such as family size, income, dependence on markets, and influence of external agents, among others, interact with the biophysical environment to produce socio-hydrological outcomes. Livelihood decisions and outcomes not only are dependent on socio-economic factors such as proximity of employment sources and the number of individuals to tend to farming operations, they are also tied to periodicity of rainfall and the reliability of surface water to maintain livelihood operations. As a result, an understanding of both social and biophysical characteristics is essential when examining coupled outcomes within water-scarce environments. In the Mount Kenya region, livelihoods are heavily dependent on the availability of water, whether through rainfall or surface water. To manage this essential resource, irrigation projects have been established on the western and north-western slopes of the mountain. The management committees of these irrigation projects determine water availability during seasonal dry periods, enforce penalties for water misuse, make repairs to damaged infrastructure, and collect membership and maintenance fees. The ability of the irrigation projects to reliably deliver is essential in determining the agricultural performance of the member households. The 2013 household questionnaire was designed to understand household characteristics, seasonal water availability, irrigation project management, and, most importantly, how these forces combine to create socio-hydrological outcomes. Such outcomes include household food security, agricultural sustainability, and appropriate water use. The 2013 household survey was administered within twenty-five irrigation projects to over 750 households on the western and north-western slopes of Mount Kenya to capture a range of socio-hydrological outcomes.
2013 Management Committee Questionnaire: Snowmelt Dependent Systems in the United States and Kenya
(2013) Evans, Tom; Dell'Angelo, Jampel; McCord, Paul
"Within water-scarce environments, household characteristics such as family size, income, dependence on markets, and influence of external agents, among others, interact with the biophysical environment to produce socio-hydrological outcomes. Livelihood decisions and outcomes not only are dependent on socio-economic factors such as proximity of employment sources and the number of individuals to tend to farming operations, they are also tied to periodicity of rainfall and the reliability of surface water to maintain livelihood operations. As a result, an understanding of both social and biophysical characteristics is essential when examining coupled outcomes within water-scarce environments. In the Mount Kenya region, livelihoods are heavily dependent on the availability of water, whether through rainfall or surface water. To manage this essential resource, irrigation projects have been established on the western and north-western slopes of the mountain. The management committees of these irrigation projects determine water availability during seasonal dry periods, enforce penalties for water misuse, make repairs to damaged infrastructure, and collect membership and maintenance fees. The ability of the irrigation projects to reliably deliver water is essential in determining the agricultural performance of the member households. The 2013 management committee questionnaire was administered to the management committee of each irrigation project. Management committees typically consist of a chairperson, vice-chairperson, treasurer, secretary, and representatives from the separate irrigation lines within the project. The survey was primarily designed to understand attributes of the irrigation project that were better addressed in a group setting. This included questions regarding the cost of membership, the monthly rate to maintain membership, the age of the irrigation project, the number of days per month that project members irrigate their fields, and the topics that are typically discussed during irrigation project meetings. The 2013 management committee survey was administered within twenty-five irrigation projects on the western and north-western slopes of Mount Kenya."
2013 Manager Questionnaire: Snowmelt Dependent Systems in the United States and Kenya
(2013) Evans, Tom; Dell'Angelo, Jampel; McCord, Paul
"Within water-scarce environments, household characteristics such as family size, income, dependence on markets, and influence of external agents, among others, interact with the biophysical environment to produce socio-hydrological outcomes. Livelihood decisions and outcomes not only are dependent on socio-economic factors such as proximity of employment sources and the number of individuals to tend to farming operations, they are also tied to periodicity of rainfall and the reliability of surface water to maintain livelihood operations. As a result, an understanding of both social and biophysical characteristics is essential when examining coupled outcomes within water-scarce environments. In the Mount Kenya region, livelihoods are heavily dependent on the availability of water, whether through rainfall or surface water. To manage this essential resource, irrigation projects have been established on the western and north-western slopes of the mountain. The management committees of these irrigation projects determine water availability during seasonal dry periods, enforce penalties for water misuse, make repairs to damaged infrastructure, and collect membership and maintenance fees. The ability of the irrigation projects to reliably deliver water is essential in determining the agricultural performance of the member households. The 2013 manager questionnaire was administered to the chairperson of each irrigation project. It was designed to understand attributes of the irrigation projects (such as age of the infrastructure and membership fees), land and water assets of the irrigation project members, agricultural activities taking place within the irrigation project, and the rules and norms that exist within the irrigation project. Questions concerning the rules and norms represented the majority of manager survey questions, as the inner workings of the irrigation projects are revealed through examination of monitoring structures, monetary penalties, participation in project meetings, distribution of water during low flow periods, and coordination with other irrigation projects. The 2013 manager survey was administered within twenty-five irrigation projects. More than twenty-five manager surveys were administered, since, on occasion, surveys were administered not only to the chairperson of the irrigation project, but also to the secretary and/or treasurer."
An Approach to Assess Relative Degradation in Dissimilar Forests: Toward a Comparative Assessment of Institutional Outcomes
(2008) Tucker, Catherine; Randolph, J.C.; Evans, Tom; Andersson, Krister P.; Persha, Lauren; Green, Glen M.
"A significant challenge in the assessment of forest management outcomes is the limited ability to compare forest conditions quantitatively across ecological zones. We propose an approach for comparing different forest types through the use of reference forests. We tested our idea by drawing a sample of 42 forests from the Midwest USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Bolivia, Uganda, and Nepal. We grouped these forests by shared characteristics and selected a reference forest to serve as a baseline for each forest type. We developed an index of disturbances using ratios of several forest measurements to assess differences between each study forest and its reference forest. None of the study forests was known to have been impacted by major natural disturbances during the past 50 years. Therefore, the disturbances in these forests appear to be largely related to human activities. The forests most similar to their reference forests have had limited human interventions. Our results indicate the potential of this approach to compare different forest conditions across biomes. We argue that development of this approach could facilitate analyses of forest management institutions, promote reliable indicators to compare management outcomes, and contribute to improved policies for conservation."
Household-level Heterogeneity of Water Resources within Common-pool Resource Systems
(2017) McCord, Paul; Dell'Angelo, Jampel; Gower, Drew; Caylor, Kelly K.; Evans, Tom
"Prior work has demonstrated the ability of common property systems to sustain institutional arrangements governing natural resources over long periods of time. Much of this work has focused on irrigation systems where upstream users agree to management arrangements that distribute water resources across both upstream and downstream users. A series of design principles have been identified that tend to lead to long-term sustained water management in these types of irrigation systems. However, this prior work has focused on the aggregate outcomes of the water system, and there has been little work evaluating the heterogeneity of water delivery within irrigation systems in developing countries. Heterogeneity of water resources within these systems has implications for livelihood outcomes because it can be indicative of a social, technological, and/or biophysical element facilitating or detracting from water delivery. We present a multilevel analysis of households nested within 25 smallholder irrigation systems in Kenya. Specifically, we examine household-level water outcomes (i.e., average flow rate and reliability of water provisioning) and the community-level and household-level drivers that affect household water outcomes. These drivers include physical infrastructure, institutional infrastructure, and biophysical variables. Much of the common-pool resource literature addresses the rule clusters responsible for natural resource outcomes, but by considering an array of both institutional and physical features and the water delivery outcomes produced at the household level, we offer new explanations for water disparities within smallholder-operated irrigation systems. We further discuss the ability of user-group members to reshape their water delivery outcomes through information exchange."
Open Source and Open Content: A Framework for Global Collaboration in Social-Ecological Research
(2005) Schweik, Charles M.; Evans, Tom; Grove, J. Morgan
"This paper discusses opportunities for alternative collaborative approaches for socialecological research in general and, in this context, for modeling land-use/land-cover change. In this field, the rate of progress in academic research is steady but perhaps not as rapid or efficient as might be possible with alternative organizational frameworks. The convergence of four phenomena provides new opportunities for cross-organizational collaboration: (1) collaborative principles related to 'open source' (OS) software development, (2) the emerging area of 'open content' (OC) licensing, (3) the World Wide Web as a platform for scientific communication, and (4) the traditional concept of peer review. Although private individuals, government organizations, and even companies have shown interest in the OS paradigm as an alternative model for software development, it is less commonly recognized that this collaborative framework is a potential innovation of much greater proportions. In fact, it can guide the collective development of any intellectual content, not just software. This paper has two purposes. First, we describe OS and OC licensing, dispense with some myths about OS, and relate these structures to traditional scientific process. Second, we outline how these ideas can be applied in an area of collaborative research relevant to the study of social-ecological systems. It is important to recognize that the concept of OS is not new, but the idea of borrowing OS principles and using OC licensing for broader scientific collaboration is new. Over the last year, we have been trying to initiate such an OS/OC collaboration in the context of modeling land use and land cover. In doing so, we have identified some key issues that need to be considered, including project initiation, incentives of project participants, collaborative infrastructure, institutional design and governance, and project finance. OS/OC licensing is not a universal solution suitable for all projects, but the framework presented here does present tangible advantages over traditional methods of academic research."
Spatially Explicit Ontology for the Institutional Analysis of Social-Ecological Systems
(2009) Evans, Tom; Cox, Michael; López, Maria Claudia
"Dynamics within complex social-ecological systems (SES) are the product of a diverse array of socio-economic and biophysical processes. The spatial structure of these systems often influences the management of resources (e.g. forests, water, fish) including the institutional rules that are developed governing how these systems can be used. Prior work has developed frameworks to describe SESs to address what institutional contexts make SESs resilient or sustainable, but without articulating the spatial relationships inherent in these systems. The objective of this paper is to develop an ontology designed to describe the actors, resources and relationships within an SES, with an emphasis on the spatial relationships inherent in human environment interactions. This ontology can be used to explore what spatial structures contribute to the resilience or sustainability of SESs. Many elements of SESs have explicitly spatial characteristics that in part affect the dynamics within those systems such as the proximity of actors to a resource, or the size of land holdings. The ontology presented here emphasizes the actors and resources in a system as well as the spatial characteristics and relationships that relate to the institutional factors affecting system dynamics. A series of three distinct case studies are used to demonstrate how this ontological framework can be applied to specific SESs. While the presentation here focuses on community level dynamics, the general framework presented here is broadly applicable to a wider array of analytical scales from local to regional level dynamics."
Strengthening the Food Systems Governance Evidence Base: Supporting Commensurability of Research through a Systematic Review of Methods
(2016) Delaney, Aogán; Evans, Tom; McGreevy, John; Blekking, Jordan; Schlachter, Tyler; Korhonen-Kurki, Kaisa; Tamás, Peter A.; Crane, Todd A.; Eakin, Hallie; Förch, Wiebke; Jones, Lindsey; Nelson, Donald R.; Oberlack, Christoph; Purdon, Mark
"Governance of food systems is a poorly understood determinant of food security. Much scholarship on food systems governance is non-empirical, while existing research is often case study-based and theoretically and methodologically incommensurable. This frustrates aggregation of evidence and generalisation. We undertook a systematic review of methods used in food systems governance research with a view to identifying a core set of indicators for future research. We gathered literature through a structured consultation and sampling from recent reviews. Indicators were identified and classified according to the levels and sectors they investigate. We found a concentration of indicators in food production at local to national levels and a sparseness in distribution and consumption. Unsurprisingly, many indicators of institutional structure were found, while agency-related indicators are moderately represented. We call for piloting and validation of these indicators and for methodological development to fill gaps identified. These efforts are expected to support a more consolidated future evidence base and eventual meta-analysis."
What Incentivizes Local Forest Conservation Efforts? Evidence from Bolivia
(2015) Wright, Glenn Daniel; Andersson, Krister P.; Gibson, Clark; Evans, Tom
"Efforts to promote forest conservation have focused on two separate types of policy reforms. Decentralization reforms have attempted to make local forest governance more accountable to demands from voters. Meanwhile, Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes like the REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) have sought to use economic incentives to promote conservation. These programs make different assumptions about the incentives most likely to work in forest conservation. Decentralization reforms assume that citizen pressures on politicians will encourage conservation, while PES approaches assume that an economic incentive—money—is the best approach. Which type of incentive works best in settings with weak institutions? Here, using a unique longitudinal dataset of forest policy in 100 Bolivian municipalities, we examine the relationships between citizen pressures and economic incentives on forest policy. We find that both types of incentives are positively and significantly associated with government investments in forest conservation, and that the magnitudes of these relationships are similar. Further, we find that economic incentives may be especially effective at promoting conservation where citizen pressures are weak or absent."
Who Decides? Investigating Decision Making Dynamics of Community Water Projects on Mount Kenya
(2015) Dell'Angelo, Jampel; McCord, Paul; Muriuki, Charles; Evans, Tom
"We examine a set of Community Water Projects (CWPs) among four different river basin Water Resource Users Associations (WRUAs) in Kenya where management committees play a central role in water allocation and management. The research involved 95 community water project managers from 20 different CWPs management committees and investigated the internal dynamics of group decision making that are effectively in place. Specifically our research studied the level of coherence between individual decision preferences and group decisions, as well as the factors that influence the final decisions as a result of small group decision making internal dynamics."