This paper introduces a special issue featuring a set of papers on institutional arrangements for reconciling rural poverty reduction with renewable natural resources conservation in the low-income tropics. Collectively, these papers make four core points. First, synergies do not naturally...

Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Model based climate forecasts could benefit such populations, provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations. We test whether pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya update their...

This paper presents comparative qualitative and quantitative evidence from rural Kenya and Madagascar in an attempt to untangle the causality behind persistent poverty. We find striking differences in welfare dynamics depending on whether one uses total income, including stochastic terms and...

This essay introduces a special section of this issue containing a set of papers on the dynamics of coupled human and natural systems. We frame this introduction by setting out some of the major issues confronting researchers who wish to incorporate both economic and biophysical dynamics in...

In Kenya's arid and semi arid lands (ASALs), drought is the most pervasive hazard, natural or otherwise, encountered by households on a widespread level. This is especially true for northern Kenya, where more than 3 million pastoralist households are regularly hit by increasingly severe...

We model interhousehold transfers between nomadic livestock herders as the state-dependent consequence of individuals' strategic interdependence resulting from the existence of multiple, opposing externalities. A public good security externality among individuals sharing a social (e.g., ethnic)...

In the pastoral and agropastoral systems of east Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL), climatic shocks, price volatility, disease outbreaks, and widespread violence beget frequent, severe disruption of already-fragile livelihoods. The past year's drought dramatically demonstrates that...