Background: Sustainable land management is considered as one of the useful approaches to combat the threat of various forms of land degradation in Ethiopia. Despite this, there is scant information regarding households' decision towards the implementation of sustainable land management practices. This paper, therefore, looks into the determinants for the continued use and choice of the sustainable land management practices by smallholder farmers and its productivity effect in three randomly chosen districts in Tigrai region, Ethiopia. The study uses data from household survey and key informant interviews. The paper employs a binary logit to analyze the determinants for the decision of continued use of sustainable land management practices, and a multivariate probit to analyze the simultaneous adoption decision of sustainable land management practices using cross sectional data collected from 230 randomly selected households. The impact of sustainable land management practices was also evaluated using propensity score matching. Results: Farming techniques, wealth status, agro-ecological variations, and plot level characteristics were found to be associated with the implementation decision of sustainable land management practices by rural households. Besides, institutional supports and access to basic infrastructures influenced the overall continued use of sustainable land management practices and the preference of households toward these practices. The study also finds that the value of crop production of sustainable land management users was on average 77-100% higher than that of nonusers. Conclusions: The results of the current study confirm that the implementation of various sustainable land management practices are influenced by farming technologies deployed by rural households, agro-ecological variations, plot characteristics, and institutional supports. The findings also affirm that most of the sustainable land management practices are complementary to one another, and implementing two or more sustainable land management practices on a given plot is highly associated with higher value of crop production. Such complementarity highlights that the productivity effect of a given sustainable land management practice is enhanced by the use of the other ones.

The increasing population pressure in the rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa has caused land degradation as well as an increase in the number of landless farmers. To promote a conservation-oriented utilization of communal lands and increase the livelihood of poor farmers, the Ethiopian government introduced a program to distribute less-utilized communal lands to landless farmers. This study identified the social norms related to natural resource conservation that affect the participation in this program. Using data from 477 farmer households in northern Ethiopia, we estimated probit models with endogenous regressors for the determinants of social norms and their impacts on program participation. The results show that social norms related to conservation positively affect program participation. Regarding policy implication of the findings, an intervention to improve the social norms of local farmers leads to sustainable resource conservation without reducing intrinsic motivation of the local people. A conservation-oriented utilization of the communal lands would be more effective if the land distribution program was accompanied by other programs to improve the social norms in the villages.

The problem of landlessness has become one of the major challenges facing rural farmers in Tigrai region since the early 1990s. To address the problem, the regional government of Tigrai started to redistribute degraded communal land to landless farmers by ensuring their participation in soil and water conservation activities and willingness to engage in the programme. Thus, the specific objectives of this study are to examine the livelihood options and analyse their economic dependence level of the rural landless households on the apportioned degraded communal land. Data were collected from randomly selected landless households and analysed using descriptive and econometric techniques. Accordingly, the study identified plantation of timber trees, grass collection, engaging in animal fattening, fruit or vegetable production, beekeeping and poultry production were the major livelihood activities practised in the allocated degraded communal land. The study also indicated that the major factors influencing the dependence level of rural landless households on allocated communal land include gender of household head, marital status of household head, distance to farmers’ training centre, livestock holding, land ownership, experience in the programme, communal land ownership type, financial support and per capita expenditure of the households. Therefore, the study concluded that even if the regional government tried to solve the problem of landlessness through hillside distribution programme, it could not sufficiently support the livelihood of the landless rural households in the study districts.

Farmers in developing countries depend on communal natural resources, yet countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are facing the severe degradation of communal lands due to the so-called “tragedy of the commons”. For the sustainable management of common resources, policy interventions, such as farmer seminars, are necessary to ensure high-level cooperation among farmers for land conservation. However, the effects of this type of information provision are not well known. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of the dissemination of conservation information on collaborative communal forest management using an economic field experiment with 936 farmers selected by random sampling from 11 villages in the northern Ethiopian Highlands. We conducted a public goods game experiment using a framework of voluntary contribution to communal land conservation with an intervention to remind participants about the consequence of their behaviors. The results show that the volunteer contribution increased after the intervention, and thereafter the decay of the contribution was slow. The results indicate that providing information about the consequences leads to a higher contribution. The effects of information provision are heterogeneous in terms of social condition, such as access to an urban area and social capital, and individual characteristics, such as wealth. These findings imply that information provision effectively improves farmer collaboration toward natural resource conservation in developing countries.

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