Richard Bilsborrow - US grants

A detailed methodological investigation into the determinants of migration in low-income countries is proposed. The project is concerned with estimating the determinants of geographic mobility for both households and individuals. The analysis will be carried out for Ecuador because of the availability of an unusually rich micro-level data set. These data will be merged with areal variables for purposes of empirical estimation. Comparisons of models typical of past empirical studies (based on more limited data) with our own will indicate the extent to which expanded models are desirable and previous models misspecified. Methodological improvements over previous work also include: 1. The incorporation of community and structural variables relating to community facilities and extra-familial economic conditions in household migration decision functions; 2. A structural equations approach to the understanding of the direct and indirect effects of contextual variables on migration decision-making; 3. The estimation of separate migration functions for the movement of entire households and individuals; 4. Comparison of the determinants of actual migration; and 5. Selective use of probit and logit estimation techniques.

Our aims are: (1) Develop a complete conceptual model of the determinants of fertility which incorporates community level factors. This model expands upon the economic model of household demand for children by explicitly including a broader range of individual and household variables, as well as community factors. While the ultimate dependent variable is recent fertility, determinants of demand for children and use of fertility regulation will also be investigates. (2) Develop a conceptual view of the processes by which the environment influences fertility, which arises from the theoretical model. (3) Develop appropriate procedures for estimating the model and its key components. Advanced econometric procedures will be used to estimate individual, household and community determinants. Careful consideration will be given to whether variables should be considered exogenous or endogenous (based on the theoretical model), to appropriate temporal relationships, and to assumptions about the error structure. (4) Estimate the model for two developing countries using unusually rich data sets. The countries and regions proposed are the Bicol region of the Philippines and Mexico. The data will permit testing a more realistic and complex model of household decision making, involving developing and testing better measures of the dependent and independent variables. (5) Simulation will be used to help pinpoint areas where missing data are likely to lead to model misspecification and biased estimates of parameters and to conduct policy and behavioral simulations using estimated parameters for the two countries, thereby helping identify future data collection needs. Implementation of the project should lead to an appreciation of the value of a complete theory of household fertility decision making for clearly specifying hypotheses about how community-level factors influence fertility. This will permit more valid policy inferences -- a major long-term objective. Similarly, identifying areas of needed data collection relates directly to another major objective to participate in questionnaire and survey/sample design in a future survey developing country to progress towards filling the gaps.

One of the processes by which human activity has most dramatically altered natural environmental conditions across the globe in recent decades has been the destruction of large tracts of tropical rainforest. Millions of acres have been cleared in the Amazon basin of South America. Considerable scholarly attention has focused on the biological, atmospheric, and hydrological ramifications of accelerated deforestation, but relatively little research has been conducted to identify and understand the attitudes that residents of the Amazon have toward the rainforests and the processes by which they clear land individually and as members of groups. This project will consist of a pilot study to refine survey instruments and will provide preliminary results to facilitate refinement of hypotheses for a larger study of the attitudes and actions of rainforest residents rainforest in the Sucumbios province of northeastern Ecuador. Surveys will be tested in interviews with members of roughly 400 households. These tests will determine the most effective means of gathering descriptive information about the demographic and economic characteristics and the land- and resource-use practices of settlers; they also will refine methods for effectively eliciting information about household attitudes regarding current status and future aspirations, the availability of resources, and the institutional and societal factors affecting individual activities. In addition to refining data gathering capabilities, results from the trial surveys will be used to improve a model that relates social and ecological processes. The project will be conducted in coordination with the Consejo Nacional de Desarrollo, an agency of the Ecuador government. This project will significantly improve our knowledge of the efficacy of specific surveying and interviewing approaches in settings like northeastern Ecuador. More importantly, it will provide a means for gathering valuable information about the characteristics of settlers who are clearing large tracts of tropical rainforest and the perceptions and attitudes that lead them to act in that way. The broader significance of this research therefore will be felt both with respect to our general understandings of how people value and use natural resourcesand also in our improved knowledge about of the ways in which social and economic processes contribute to dramatic changes in the natural environment.

This is a Shannon Award providing partial support for research projects that fall short of the assigned institute's funding range but are in the margin of excellence. The Shannon award is intended to provide support to test the feasibility of the approach; develop further tests and refine research techniques; perform secondary analysis of available data sets; or conduct discrete projects that can demonstrate the PI's research capabilities or lend additional weight to an already meritorious application. Further scientific data for the CRISP System are unavailable at this time.

9320819 BILSBORROW The goal of this research is to investigate the factors influencing land use and deforestation by migrant settlers in the rainforest of the Ecuadorian Amazon. This area, which is considered to be one of the world's "hot spots" in terms of its rich biodiversity, is now undergoing massive human intervention in the form of agricultural colonization by spontaneous flows of migrants along roads built by petroleum companies. Currently, the conflicting aims of protecting the environment and economically developing the country are dramatically apparent; satellite photos of the region taken over the past decade vividly show rapid deforestation. This project builds on a previous grant from NSF which was used to collect critical information from 419 colonist households. This project will analyze those data using Tobit estimation procedures to explain the proportion of settlers' lands devoted to different categories of land use. These proportions will be explained using three major sets of variables: (1) household demographic and socio-economic characteristics, (2) natural resource conditions on the farm, and (3) the policy and institutional context. This research will provide important new insights into the factors influencing the behavior of colonists in one of the world's most important and sensitive environments. Thus it will contribute to our basic understanding of the interaction of factors in a developing area with a deep tension between environmental preservation and economic development. Results of the research should contribute to the development of more appropriate policies to promote sustainable development in the region.

SBR-9511134 SBR-9511129 SBR-9511108 Richard Bilsborrow Victoria Lawson Andrew Morrison U.N.C. - Chapel Hill U. Washington Tulane U. Collaborative Research: Household Relations, Migration Decisions, and Employment Outcomes This collaborative research proposal requests funding to conduct field research and quantitative and qualitative analyses of intra-household relationships, migration decisions by different household members, and employment outcomes in destination regions. The research questions and design are the result of collaboration among two economists, a geographer, and a biostatistician. The field area is several urban areas in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian setting is characterized by rapid urban population growth (including via in-migration) in the context of rapid, policy-induced, changes in economic structure. The field work entails three stages over 18 months: extensive surveys of migrant and non-migrant households in destination cities; household surveys in the main origin areas; and in-depth case histories for migrants in destination areas to complement and extend the survey findings through detailed examinations of the connections between life, household, and work histories. The results will: focus attention on household structures and dynamics as influences on migration processes; combine research traditions of migration as an individual, household and local-context phenomenon; and relate migration motivations to employment outcomes at the destination.

The objective of the project is to determine the demographic, socio-economic and biophysical factors affecting the intensity of land use by migrant colonists and indigenous populations in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Data on colonists collected in an earlier project will be complemented by new data collection in indigenous areas. The data analysis compares and contrasts behavior and determinants between colonist and indigenous populations and among four indigenous groups, which differ in size of territory, population size and density, and degree of integration into the market economy. Drawing upon the theoretical perspectives of demography, landscape ecology, and political ecology, we develop a conceptual model which links the demographic, biophysical, and socio- economic factors influencing land use to an intensity of land use gradient. An ethnographic study in five indigenous communities will be carried out to study the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors pertaining to population and land use, and to inform the development of survey questionnaires. Using this model, we will (1) measure the demographic (household size and composition), biophysical (land quality and availability), and socioeconomic (property regimes and access to key infrastructure) factors for colonists and indigenous populations through household and community surveys; (2) use Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to identify dwellings, agricultural plots, and land use; and (3) process satellite imagery to determine land cover types, land use patterns, landscape features and infrastructure. The geo-referenced socio-economic, demographic, and biophysical data will be integrated within a geographic information system (GIS) in order to derive measures for multi-level statistical models of the determinants of land use intensity. By integrating data collected from both native residents and migrant settlers, this project provides essentially complete overage of land use in the northeastern Ecuadorian Amazon, and tests general hypotheses which elucidate land use patterns in other parts of the world. The Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the proposed primary Pleistocene forest refugia (Haffer, 1969), is an area of extraordinary plant and animal diversity and endemism. Ecuador is losing about 1.8 percent of its Amazon forests per year-the highest loss rate of any Amazon basin country. This region is thus an excellent study site for observing the behavior of rapidly growing populations of small farmers and a diverse population of indigenous peoples in the face of an increasingly densely-populated rainforest frontier.

The environment is commonly invoked as an underlying cause of human migration in the developing world, both in the human-environment literature and in the publications of conservation and development organizations. Despite the frequency of these claims, few studies have systematically investigated migration-environment relationships, particularly for widespread forms of gradual environmental and landscape change like soil degradation and deforestation. These changes are known to threaten the sustainability of rural livelihoods, including smallholder agriculture and wild product collection. This doctoral dissertation research project will apply a multi-method approach to investigate these relationships in an important center of out-migration and environmental change in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, asking the core question: What are the connections between environmental change, out-migration, and resource-dependent livelihood strategies? The doctoral candidate predicts that environmental change stimulates out-migration, particularly from agrarian households and towards rural destinations, and that it does so by reducing the productivity of smallholder agriculture. Data collection will include a survey of a sample of communities and households from the study area. The student also will use qualitative methods and spatial analytic approaches, drawing on advances in the field of population-environment research. The subsequent analysis will use multilevel regression models to estimate the effects of environmental variables at both household and community scales on (1) individual out-migration and (2) household participation in resource-dependent livelihood strategies, while controlling for other effects at these scales. Interpretation of these results will be informed by the qualitative data collection. This approach will provide insight into the complex interactions of human livelihoods and the physical environment in rural landscapes of the developing world.

This project will address two key processes of rural transformation in the developing world: out-migration, which is leading to population decline in many rural areas, and environmental and landscape change, which is eroding local biodiversity and the sustainability of rural livelihoods. The interaction of these processes has been claimed to displace millions of "environmental refugees" each year, but the real dimensions of this problem are unknown. These issues are of immediate concern to community members in the study area, where soil degradation and droughts have paralleled rapid out-migration to international, urban, and frontier destinations. This project will address these concerns in a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary way that will inform the actions of governmental and non-governmental organizations working for conservation with development. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Rural communities throughout the developing world are being transformed by out-migration to urban, frontier, and international destinations. Nevertheless, key questions about this out-migration have not been addressed adequately by current approaches, including the role of the larger context in out-migration. In particular, existing studies have not addressed the potentially critical linkages between migration and the rural environment, specifically the effects of environmental factors on out-migration from rural areas. Growing out of earlier research on deforestation by migrant settlers in the Ecuadorian Amazon, we ask: Why are people leaving rural areas of origin; what are the roles of environmental degradation, rural poverty, farm assets, and other factors? How are out-migrants selected by type of destination? And how do the factors determining migration differ according to the type of destination? This project will design novel data collection procedures to be implemented as part of household and community-level surveys, and will link survey data to remotely sensed data and spatially derived variables, including geographic accessibility. A key innovation of the study will be to develop and test measures of environmental quality from satellite imagery and other spatial datasets and to compare them with survey data from households on environmental conditions. To estimate the effects of environmental and other factors on rural out-migration, we will use a multilevel model of migration that takes into account contextual, individual and household factors, including environmental factors at household, community and larger scales. These results will help generate a broadly-applicable framework useful in future empirical research on the linkages between migration and the rural environment. Finally, a key issue in migration research is the selectivity of migrants and the inability to observe or collect data in origin-area-based surveys on whole departed households, since there is no one left behind in the household to provide reliable information. Such migrating households may differ in important ways from those who leave as individuals with the rest of the household remaining behind, and the factors affecting out- migration may differ. Therefore, we will also collect data on whole households that recently left the community from close neighbors/relatives to compare their characteristics and the determinants of their out-migration with those of individual migrants as well as non-migrant and migrant-sending households. This will provide the basis for a methodological evaluation of the origin-area approach to migration. PROPOSAL NARRATIVE The proposal focuses on how environmental degradation such as deforestation or soil erosion influence why people leave rural areas of Ecuador. People are leaving rural areas all over the world for cities and other countries. Environmental degradation makes it harder for people to make a living, and causes health problems too. The proposal studies whether having good local health facilities and road access to them helps people cope and remain in rural areas rather than leave. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

Perverse economic effects can create strong negative feedbacks between natural and human systems. For example, short-term, fine-scale, net economic benefits from uses of natural resources that compromise the future supply of related resources can reduce long-term, large-scale economic benefits. Numerous governmental programs have effectively tested the hypothesis that such negative feedbacks can be eliminated with economic counter-incentives, but few if any of these programs have been suitable for and subjected to the rigorous scientific analysis needed to determine the true results of the test and help generalize results. This project will analyze what is probably the largest program within the most widely used type of counter-incentive, the Sloping Lands Conversion Program of China, a program of payment for environmental services. Under this program, the government pays farmers to convert cropland on sloping or otherwise ecologically sensitive areas to forest or grassland. Researchers will survey farmers and local governmental agencies in three provinces to determine how the program was implemented and affected the decisions of farmers, detect changes in land cover using satellite imagery, and model carbon storage and water availability based on field measurements.

Results of this project will be of great value to policy makers and land use managers in the U.S., where similar programs have been tried and are envisioned in the context of ecological restoration and protection. The research also will help inform the global discourse on reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. This project will strengthen scientific collaboration in both social and natural science between the U.S. and China, and train numerous undergraduate and graduate students.

Forests are extremely important because they serve as homes for millions of animals and plants. Those organisms live, provide people with wood for building houses and for cooking, and they cool the climate by absorbing carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, forests continue to be cut down, especially in poor countries. To prevent forests from further decline, people in some communities are protecting them with what is called Community Forestry. In community forestry programs people in a village work together to decide what to do with their forests. About a third of the forests in poor countries are managed this way. However, community forestry does not always work. This project will find out why some villages in Nepal are successful in community forestry while others not. The researchers will work closely with local stakeholders to improve their forest management strategies that can benefit communities worldwide. In addition to this impact on forestry the project will train graduate and undergraduate students and leave a lasting legacy in Nepal. The United States will economically benefit from this research as a result of better community forest management through resource preservation and reduced carbon dioxide levels.

The main goal of this project is to study how can be improved to better preserve the forests and support the lives of forest-dependent people. To achieve this goal, this research will address the following questions: (1) How do community forestry practices affect people’s livelihoods and their social interactions? (2) How do those practices influence rural out-migration? (3) How do they affect land-use? (4) How has COVID-19 influenced rural people’s livelihoods and their dependence on community forestry? (5) How has community forestry influenced the ecosystem’s provision of goods and services? The researchers will interview households about their forest management practices, the origin of management rules, and the role of community members in making rules. They will also be surveyed to determine detailed information about their agricultural practices, out migration patterns, and if community forestry has helped buffer COVID-19 impacts. Remote sensing data collected by satellites, in situ hydrological data on the ground, and statistical, ecological and hydrological models will also be used to estimate how much water forests use, and how much carbon dioxide they absorb from the atmosphere. Eventually an Integrated Modeling System will be developed to study the interactions among forests, human activities, and the ecosystem goods and services the environment provides. This project will advance theory on common pool resource management, rural out migration, as well as the land use and forest-ecosystem service relationship. The new knowledge to be gained from this research will be highly valuable when developing new policies for sustainable community forestry in Nepal and other countries.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.